Bitcoin's Empty Blocks Analaysis.

[PrimeNumber7]

How frequently over the past 5 years have miners put their name into the coinbase tx as you describe? Is this how most block explorers determine which pool found each block this way? Or do they look at different/additional information?

[pooya87]

How frequently over the past 5 years have miners put their name into the coinbase tx as you describe? Is this how most block explorers determine which pool found each block this way? Or do they look at different/additional information?

from genesis block (block zero) coinbase transactions were allowed to put anything they wanted in their input's signature script since coinbase transaction doesn't really have any input (empty outpoint and max index). and Satoshi is the first miner who put something there (Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks).
but it is optional, so only big mining pools put their name mostly as advertisement. interesting enough if you look closer each pool has multiple servers and each server puts a different name in there. there may be miners who don't though.
i believe that is the only way block explorers or any other chain analyzers determine hashrate distribution. the only other way would be if the pools publicly published ALL their addresses so we could see which address is receiving which blocks' rewards. which is not possible since addresses can change constantly.

[PrimeNumber7]

How frequently over the past 5 years have miners put their name into the coinbase tx as you describe? Is this how most block explorers determine which pool found each block this way? Or do they look at different/additional information?

from genesis block (block zero) coinbase transactions were allowed to put anything they wanted in their input's signature script since coinbase transaction doesn't really have any input (empty outpoint and max index). and Satoshi is the first miner who put something there (Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks).
but it is optional, so only big mining pools put their name mostly as advertisement. interesting enough if you look closer each pool has multiple servers and each server puts a different name in there. there may be miners who don't though.
i believe that is the only way block explorers or any other chain analyzers determine hashrate distribution. the only other way would be if the pools publicly published ALL their addresses so we could see which address is receiving which blocks' rewards. which is not possible since addresses can change constantly.

I have noticed over the years that some pools use the same address for block reward payout, while others don’t and some pools have paid out to their miners directly.

I guess my question is if you use the verbose 2 option for the getblock RPC call, how many blocks could you determine the pool that mined each block?

I would not be surprised to see major pools to have different servers putting different message variations into the input signature script of the Coinbase transaction for debugging purposes.

[kano]

the main reason for empty blocks has always been SPV mining, that is the fact that miners didn't verify the previous block completely before starting the next so they start with an empty block until they verify the previous one and be able to update their mempool and add new transactions to their block. sometimes they get lucky and find the answer to that empty block and publish that.
since during the past couple of years there has been a lot of improvements in the speed of transaction verification process with all the optimizations done by core team and SPV mining is not that common anymore we are seeing a much reduced number of empty blocks nowadays.
...

What has changed is that they simply update the work to the miners faster now than they used to do it.
Simple example:

Before
Blockchange ... send out empty work.
30s later ... send out new work with transactions.

Over time I guess they realised how stupid this is and changed it to:

Now
Blockchange ... send out empty work.
A few seconds later ... send out new work with transactions.

Magic! Now they generate 10% of the empty blocks they used to generate if they take 3s instead of 30s
If they take 0.3s, empty blocks drop to 1% ... etc.

You can see that most pools are still ignoring transactions on a block change.
If you can see the mempool after each block change ... you check that, any time, after you see an empty block on the network.
... I can coz I have extra information in the logs coded into all the bitcoinds that run on my pool so I can always see the size of all work generated.

P.S. I'm one of the VERY few pools that has NEVER mined an empty block
I can only think of one other pool - and that effectively died recently when they lost yet another block due to negligence by the guy who ran the pool.

P.P.S. the time to validate a block and generate a full block is less than 200ms

[kano]

How frequently over the past 5 years have miners put their name into the coinbase tx as you describe? Is this how most block explorers determine which pool found each block this way? Or do they look at different/additional information?

At the moment I get about 99% identification from a text search or address scan of each block's coinbase transaction,
just like any of the large explorers do.

True unknown's are rare as you'll see on any of the large explorers.

Usually when it drops to the low 90s, it means someone changed their sig text so I just look at an 'unknown' and see what's changed
- e.g. f2pool changed the text a bit, recently.