Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Punishing empty blocks?

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 11:33:13 -0400

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]> wrote:
> There appears to be some non-trivial mining power devoted to mining
> empty blocks.

In the last 2016 blocks, as I write this, there are only 35 1 txn blocks.

This is about 1.73%, which wouldn't be surprising just from timing
alone.  Moreover, a fair amount (I didn't measure the percentage)
appear to be mined by Eligius— Luke does some clever pre-computation
of the hash tree for faster distribution right after new blocks.

Resources expended on fancy (and potentially risky) techno-economic
hacks to discourage empty blocks would probably be better spent
writing very fast transaction tree generating code.

Can we kill this thread now?