I think he was just using that block as an example.
Sure, I was just wondering if he was providing his miners with extra reward by trying to include as many high value Tx as possible.
Fees run about 20 BTC per day (looking @ 7 day average) compared to about 5 BTC per day at the begining of the year. There is really nothing that can be done to maximize that other than no rejecting paying txs.
I didn't realise that - I'd thought pools could select which Tx they included in the block and assumed they could prioritise based on Tx fee - incorrect?
That works out to only ~0.14 BTC per block or ~0.3%. The larger point is that fees will continue to grow as a % of miner's revenue and miner's should be aware what is happening to that revenue. 0.3% may not seem like a lot but lets fast forward to January. Hypothetically the block reward is now 25 BTC, the avg fee per tx has doubled, and the tx volume has tripled. That puts fees in the 3% to 3.5% range. As time increases the issue becomes more relevant.
That's pretty much what I was getting at although I wasn't game enough to put a prediction on it. Fast forward another four years and miners will be depending on Tx fees almost as much as the block reward.
Congrats on BitMinter being the largest pool that charges no fee AND pays out all fees collected. The true "no fee" option.
And given the steady increase in Bitminter's piece of the network hashrate, many other people are starting to feel the same way. They're where Ozcoin was at not so long ago, with a similar steady rise in percentage of network hashrate.