The Reason Why Bitcoin Miners Dedicate Time to Mining Empty Blocks

Bitcoin mining is an intriguing subject that can sometimes be overwhelming to understand at first without some research. One particular subject concerning the topic of mining is empty blocks, and people often wonder why mining pools mine them.

Mining pools are groups of bitcoin miners that work together to find and verify blocks roughly every ten minutes. Most of the time blocks are filled with transactions that are waiting to be confirmed as soon as the miner finds a specific block. Miners are rewarded 12.5 BTC and all the fees associated with the particular block they find. In the early days, blocks were not that full because bitcoin wasn’t as popular as it is today. Lately blocks have been full, often to the maximum size of 1 MB.

Blocks filled with transactions are not the only blocks mined on the network as empty blocks are mined as well. Empty blocks actually do have a transaction in them called the coinbase which is included first in every block. The main reason why pools mine empty blocks is because they are performing operations non-stop. Now the biggest qualm people have with miners who dedicate energy to mining an empty block is due to the recent throughput congestion these days.