Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9

[wachtwoord]

Why would anyone push out 0 tx transactions without malicious intent? Putting in the transactions costs negligible effort, rakes in a little bit of fees and helps Bitcoin in the long run 9which is in the advanatge of someone miningtois because this is a driver, albeit small, for the price of Bicoins.

This seems scary. Can we adapt our bitcoind's to reject empty blocks? The if at least 51% of the network uses such an altered Bitcoind such a choking attack will be nullified.

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[pieppiep]

Rejecting empty blocks would be a bad idea.
If a block is generated with all the transactions so there are no more unconfirmed transactions, all hashing would stop until someone makes a new transaction.

About the botnet idea, why only one 'exit-node' to submit the work to the bitcoin network?
If I would make such a botnet, I would create multiple smaller networks within the big network so I wouldn't have to host them and they won't get to much load.

[deepceleron]

Why would anyone push out 0 tx transactions without malicious intent? Putting in the transactions costs negligible effort, rakes in a little bit of fees and helps Bitcoin in the long run 9which is in the advanatge of someone miningtois because this is a driver, albeit small, for the price of Bicoins.

Maybe they are saying FU to including transactions that have no economic benefit. If people started including 0.1+ BTC fees (which is like the minimum you'd pay with PayPal), that would encourage miners with no interest other than financial gain not to miss out on the extra income.

More likely it is easier for their operation to not update transactions with getworks/etc. If they have a botnet that is reducing the possibility of detection by only transmitting new blocks (e.g. just a single open long poll to a command and control server), they can't include transactions other than old ones, ones that have already been passed on by the last block's miner.

[wachtwoord]

No economic benefit? They are being subsidized by the community for 50BTC per block for Christ's sake. IMO no tx no subsidy,

Just reject the empty blocks and if there are no transactions there is also no use for additional blocks.

[deepceleron]

No economic benefit? They are being subsidized by the community for 50BTC per block for Christ's sake. IMO no tx no subsidy,

Just reject the empty blocks and if there are no transactions there is also no use for additional blocks.

They are being subsidized by a magic money-making algorithm, not the community. The mining reward is well thought out as a way of releasing the currency and encouraging blockchain difficulty. The only thing encouraging the inclusion of transactions in the generated block are transaction fees, which recently are approaching zero.

[pieppiep]

No economic benefit? They are being subsidized by the community for 50BTC per block for Christ's sake. IMO no tx no subsidy,

Just reject the empty blocks and if there are no transactions there is also no use for additional blocks.

They are being subsidized by a magic money-making algorithm, not the community. The mining reward is well thought out as a way of releasing the currency and encouraging blockchain difficulty. The only thing encouraging the inclusion of transactions in the generated block are transaction fees, which recently are approaching zero.

Interesting block.
Would it be possible the owner of the 1VayNert... address is the mining pool that did a large payout to multiple addresses and didn't broadcast these transactions over the network but generated this block?
It would be an interesting idea for mining pools not to pay transaction fees if they can create blocks themselves for confirming the transactions.

[deepceleron]

approaching zero.

Interesting block.
Would it be possible the owner of the 1VayNert... address is the mining pool that did a large payout to multiple addresses and didn't broadcast these transactions over the network but generated this block?
It would be an interesting idea for mining pools not to pay transaction fees if they can create blocks themselves for confirming the transactions.

That address and block is indeed deepbit, they don't pay any fees when sending, which means that miners may have to wait a long time to get their payouts. The payout address has a big balance of mature coins though (edit: correction - they are currently paying unconfirmed coins). The only pool including free transactions that break fee rules is Eligius.

Like you suggest, Eligius pays out by designating the 50BTC block-finding reward be split and paid directly to it's miners and not to their own wallet, which means they don't need a fee since they aren't re-sending coins, but the newly-minted coins need to mature 120 blocks before they can be spent.

[jjiimm_64]

well,  IMO  they have changed the IP to    195.234.103.99

[deepceleron]

Yup, 195.234.103.99 (on Alpha Networks Austria) seems to be doing the same thing, not including any transactions, so it's the same operation or someone that liked the idea. They are finding a block every ~1.5 hours, which is some serious hashing.

[wachtwoord]

No economic benefit? They are being subsidized by the community for 50BTC per block for Christ's sake. IMO no tx no subsidy,

Just reject the empty blocks and if there are no transactions there is also no use for additional blocks.

They are being subsidized by a magic money-making algorithm, not the community. The mining reward is well thought out as a way of releasing the currency and encouraging blockchain difficulty. The only thing encouraging the inclusion of transactions in the generated block are transaction fees, which recently are approaching zero.

They are subsidized by the community because giving out new coins is diluting existing coins.

Just like I am subsidizing the banking crisis in Europe because the European bank created a trillion euro's out of thin air.

[deepceleron]

No economic benefit? They are being subsidized by the community for 50BTC per block for Christ's sake. IMO no tx no subsidy,

Just reject the empty blocks and if there are no transactions there is also no use for additional blocks.

They are being subsidized by a magic money-making algorithm, not the community. The mining reward is well thought out as a way of releasing the currency and encouraging blockchain difficulty. The only thing encouraging the inclusion of transactions in the generated block are transaction fees, which recently are approaching zero.

They are subsidized by the community because giving out new coins is diluting existing coins.

Just like I am subsidizing the banking crisis in Europe because the European bank created a trillion euro's out of thin air.

New coins are generated at the same rate whether they get some of them or not; you knew that ~7200 new BTC were being made every day when you signed up (or didn't you read the terms and conditions?)

[wachtwoord]

Of course I know. But they should be awarded to people actually processing transactions. That is what they (me included cause I mine as well) signed up for. The only practical use of mining is transaction processing. Miners should do that or not get paid imo.

[Transisto]

They may simply not be using the same client and they haven't taken the time nor have any incentive to include this feature.
It would cost them close to nothing in term of computing power to include the transcations.

In the long run they'll eventually figure-out they're hurting themselves on a small scale my making transaction confirm slower.

(Their profit is worth less since slow transaction is no good for the BTC net.)

[deepceleron]

Of course I know. But they should be awarded to people actually processing transactions. That is what they (me included cause I mine as well) signed up for. The only practical use of mining is transaction processing. Miners should do that or not get paid imo.

The problem is that pool operators can't reasonably ignore the no-transaction blocks. If they ignored them and continued looking for a block solve based on the previous block before it, some other pool that isn't ignoring them will build on them and grow a longer blockchain. Blocks without transactions are not "bad", look at the first year of Bitcoin mining. If these guys are ignoring transactions, that's also more transaction fees to be claimed by the rest who do include transactions.

They may simply not be using the same client and they haven't taken the time nor have any incentive to include this feature.
It would cost them close to nothing in term of computing power to include the transcations.

I outlined possibilities why they might not be including transactions - including transactions requires a constant stream of network data from miner to control server. Not doing so reduces their hosting demands and reduces their exposure to detection if they are making unauthorized use of resources.

[wachtwoord]

The problem is that pool operators can't reasonably ignore the no-transaction blocks. If they ignored them and continued looking for a block solve based on the previous block before it, some other pool that isn't ignoring them will build on them and grow a longer blockchain.

They can with at least 50.00001% of the hashing power. So I implore the three biggest pool operators to stop accepting empty blocks as valid. After that, everyone will follow.

Blocks without transactions are not "bad", look at the first year of Bitcoin mining. If these guys are ignoring transactions, that's also more transaction fees to be claimed by the rest who do include transactions.

They are if there exist valid transactions waiting to be confirmed.

[piuk]

I've being trying to label 88.6.216.9 (and their old ip 88.6.208.35) for a while.

I hope they know about/support BIP30 and BIP16.

[wachtwoord]

Because I want everything to work out normally within a time frame which is as short as possible. But sure, if we wait long enough (possibly much longer than humans live) the free market will always reach the optimum given a set of rational actors.

[deepceleron]

The problem is that pool operators can't reasonably ignore the no-transaction blocks. If they ignored them and continued looking for a block solve based on the previous block before it, some other pool that isn't ignoring them will build on them and grow a longer blockchain.

They can with at least 50.00001% of the hashing power. So I implore the three biggest pool operators to stop accepting empty blocks as valid. After that, everyone will follow.

Even if 80% of the network agrees to ignore them, the "block ignorers" lose 20% of their mining income on those by making orphan blocks beaten by someone who isn't ignoring.

Blocks without transactions are not "bad", look at the first year of Bitcoin mining. If these guys are ignoring transactions, that's also more transaction fees to be claimed by the rest who do include transactions.

They are if there exist valid transactions waiting to be confirmed.

There always are transactions waiting. It would only be a threat if "bad miner" has more hashrate than everybody else and starts ignoring any blocks except the ones they mine themselves.

[wachtwoord]

Even if 80% of the network agrees to ignore them, the "block ignorers" lose 20% of their mining income by making orphan blocks beaten by someone who isn't ignoring.

That can't be right. The 20% non-ignorers wil lose 100% percent of their revenue ()their blocks are determined to be invalid by 80% of the network) and the revenue of the 80% ignores will rise by that portion (so by 25%) because still 50 BTC are awarded every 10 minutes.

And the fact that there are always transactions waiting is exactly my point.

[deepceleron]

I'll revise this post a bit upon reflection (really needs video to illustrate). There's another case I forgot:
Where 80% of all mining pools are ignoring blocks with zero transactions:

64% of the time:

[Normal block] ══╤══>[block by ignoring pool]══>[more blocks]
                 ┖┄>[no-transaction block]┄┄┄┄> orphaned

20% of the time

[Normal block] ══╤══>[no-transaction block]══>[block by normal pool]══>[more blocks]
                 ┖┄┄>[block by ignoring pool]┄┄> orphaned

16% of the time (or maybe 8%?)

[Normal block] ══╤══>[block by ignoring pool]══>[block by ignoring pool]┄┄> orphaned
                 ┖┄>[no-transaction block]══>[block by normal pool]══>[more blocks]

In the 16% case above, the "no transaction block" could have a higher difficulty hash, the normal pools would see this and still be hashing using the no-transaction block, and not be using the ignoring pool's block of lower difficulty - once one finds another block and publishes, they still win. By building on the blocks of an ignoring pool you might lose your block finding reward too... and it continues further than I can illustrate with text...