Zero Transaction Blocks

[BitCoinDream]

Is it possible to mine zero Tx blocks with CPU ?

[-ck]

It's virtually impossible to mine blocks with a CPU full stop, and it is no easier to mine blocks without transactions.

But yes, it is possible to mine blocks with zero transactions, but then that would defeat the purpose of mining, which is actually to proliferate transactions and secure the network, and the block reward is a reward for their work, though miners seem to forget that... If enough people/pools mined blocks with zero transactions it would make bitcoin suffer and the value drop as a result of lost confidence in its reliability and whoever was mining them would lose indirectly due to the drop in value.

[BitCoinDream]

It's virtually impossible to mine blocks with a CPU full stop, and it is no easier to mine blocks without transactions.

But yes, it is possible to mine blocks with zero transactions, but then that would defeat the purpose of mining, which is actually to proliferate transactions and secure the network, and the block reward is a reward for their work, though miners seem to forget that... If enough people/pools mined blocks with zero transactions it would make bitcoin suffer and the value drop as a result of lost confidence in its reliability and whoever was mining them would lose indirectly due to the drop in value.

http://blockr.io/trivia/block

Blocks with 1 transaction: 84454

[-ck]

Yep, I never said it was impossible, just a lousy idea. Some pools work on zero transaction blocks temporarily on a block change due to some theoretical chance of wining an orphan race but that's likely a bullshit optimisation. Some solo mining "entities" do not include the standard bitcoind recommended transactions and minimise them as an (assumed) optimisation and most pools include a lot of their own stuff. Most pools likely just include all the standard bitcoind transactions as well though, and cgminer's solo mining code definitely does.

[Holm]

the last two times zero block found