Bitcoin (BTC) is known for its reliability, security, and predictability. On average, every 10 minutes, the blockchain creates a new block, and a successful miner receives a block reward of 6.25 BTC, which is about $130,000.
However, from time to time, the Bitcoin blockchain surprises observers and participants.
With a block height of 776,339, nodes in the network have confirmed a completely empty block. The block was added to the Bitcoin blockchain with no transactions involved, which led to some confusion among the crypto community. So what is an empty block and how does it come about?
First, while an empty block may seem strange at first, it is actually a normal occurrence on the web. The last time it happened was a little over two weeks ago, on the block 774486.
Miners are incentivized to mine blocks as quickly as possible, and sometimes they will mine a block before they have any transactions to enable. When this happens, the block is left empty.
Bitcoin Mempool, a place to analyze the Bitcoin blockchain, offers the following explanation: “When a new block is discovered, mining pools send a transaction-free block template to miners so that they can start searching for the next block as soon as possible. . They send a block template full of transactions right after that, but a full block template requires a larger data transfer and takes a little longer to reach the miners.”
“During this time, which is usually no more than 1-2 seconds, miners sometimes get lucky and find a new block using the empty block pattern.”
In fact, the miners were “lucky” in getting the template. In this case, the bitcoin block height 776,389 was added just a few seconds after its predecessor, 776,488. However, block 776,388 earned an additional 0.086 BTC, or about $1,854 in fees, which was added to the block reward. in the amount of 6.25 BTC or about $135,247.
Even though the empty block does not contain any transactions, the miner still receives the block reward in the form of freshly minted bitcoins. Thus, Block 776,389 received 6.25 BTC; no transaction fees. Binance Pool was the winning miner, contributing 12% to the total hashrate.
It is important to note that empty blocks are not a problem for the network. By mining empty blocks, miners still produce a coin generation transaction, also known as a coinbase transaction, which keeps bitcoin on track to reach 21 million bitcoins in circulation.
Public miners increased bitcoin mining and hashrate in January
According to BitInfoCharts, the percentage of empty blocks in the network is usually around 1-2%. Today’s statistics are even more surprising given the emergence of “serial numbers” in bitcoin, or the ability to permanently engrave images, data, and stamps on the blockchain.
The increase in the number of ordinals has caused some questions and even concern in the bitcoin community, and recently the first cases of pornography have been recorded. The mempool is getting busier and there is a fight for block space as some jpeg enthusiasts struggle to contribute to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Credit : cointelegraph.com
