Why does Antpool seem to mine much higher number of empty blocks?

[logfiles]

According to this, Antpool is the second-largest mining pool after Foundry USA based on the number of blocks mined in the Last one year



But for some reason, Antpool has the highest number of empty blocks, while Foundry USA has none in the last one year. What is Foundry USA doing that Antpool is not doing?

[1714500298]

1714500298

[BitMaxz]

I think it is normal to have empty blocks it is based on luck so maybe Antpool is lucky to have an empty block compared to other pools or maybe they already have ASIC units that can solve a block in seconds which is why they have a high percentage of empty blocks.

And Antpool is owned by Bitmain, right? Since Bitmain is an ASIC miner manufacturer they may discover a new ASIC unit that can solve a block in seconds which may be the reason why they mined blocks without adding unconfirmed transactions?

There are lots of discussions about this and it seems it never ends about high percentage of empty blocks mined by Antpool.

[Z-tight]

But for some reason, Antpool has the highest number of empty blocks, while Foundry USA has none in the last one year. What is Foundry USA doing that Antpool is not doing?

It is not as if Antpool 'purposely' wants to to mine empty blocks, surely they would prefer to earn tx fees that would have been attached to tx's in the mined block, but if it is empty all they earn is just the coinbase reward. Now that tx fees are kind of high, no mining pool would be happy mining an empty block.

Mining pools are competing with one another to mine blocks and earn the reward, so speed in addition to their computational power matters a lot, as a result of this, miners could start working on an empty block without any tx in it, only to update the block after a few seconds, but then with tx's in it. However within that few seconds of working on that empty block, the mining pool can successfully mine that block and add it to the blockchain, without any tx's in it.

[nc50lc]

What is Foundry USA doing that Antpool is not doing?

Aside from being mined right after the previous block, it could also be a hint of a Covert ASIC Boost operation.
But since the latter is "Covert", we'll never know if it's the case and we can't go straight to conclusion based from that information alone.

My best guess is Foundry USA doesn't rely on SPV mining since it's for "large miners" (more info about SPV Mining)
and/or they have an extremely good connection that their miners receive the newly mined block at a very low latency (almost instantly) so even the next lucky block they mined in seconds can contain transactions.

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Typo