Author: Timo Hanke 2015-08-20 14:27:20
Published on: 2015-08-20T14:27:20+00:00
A member of the bitcoin-dev mailing list has expressed concern over miners producing empty blocks despite having fully verified the previous block, leading to suspicion that the mining hardware and software itself may be at fault. The situation has been described as "grim" with many miners unable to download and validate even much smaller blocks. Empty blocks have been mined by several different pools despite there being preceding blocks as small as 50KB with 30s passing and the miner continues to mine empty blocks via SPV mining. If miners are SPV mining for a significant portion of the hashing power, all a single malicious miner has to do is mine an invalid block on purpose, let these pools SPV mine on top of them while it mines a valid block free of their competition. This situation could lead to disastrous consequences if XT nodes are unreliable and these pools go out of business, resulting in more mining centralization which is already too centralized today.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:03:51.380329+00:00