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I just saw a new block go by at height 238440 on Blockchain.info that has no transactions but awarded 25 bitcoins. How is this possible, and, why is it possible?
Here is the block information link: https://blockchain.info/block-index/386860/00000000000000db143554fa093eda1e7d608309f733170c4c7ea2777cfd5424
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The block reward is the block subsidy plus the fees from transactions. The block subsidy is 25 BTC, and will be for 3 years.
While mining a block without transactions isn't in the spirit of Bitcoin, and doesn't have much point, it is allowed.
This is allowed... by design, or by accident? Wouldn't allowing this open the door for miners generating only "empty" blocks, to minimize their efforts? I believe this could be dangerous for the network! – Joe Pineda – 2013-05-30T01:40:53.960
3First, there are lots of empty blocks in Bitcoin - early on, when there were no transactions to include, for example. Second, a malicious miner could just make a bunch of fake transactions to fill up their block. Third, a block that's twice as long isn't twice as hard to mine. It's exactly the same. – Nick ODell – 2013-05-30T01:50:40.700
4Not including any transaction doesn't minimize their mining effort. The only extra work of including transactions is calculating the merkle root and that's trivial. From a miner's perspective (assuming that they don't consider the health of the network), transactions are trivial to include and the transaction fees add to the block reward. So they are all upside for the miners. (Except transactions without fees, which are why transactions without fees sometimes take a long time to get approved; miners have no incentive to include them.) – David Ogren – 2013-05-30T15:51:32.150
I had always wonderd how had Nakamoto created the first blocks - I had assumed he had created bogus transactions sending the same bitcoin from one address to another and back, over and over... So, if the effort to mine a block is the same regardless of its length, that explains everything, thanks. – Joe Pineda – 2013-05-30T18:27:21.223
If too many miners produce empty blocks because of the lack of a profit motive, the market transaction fee rate will rise to the point where it becomes profitable once more. So the situation is self-correcting. – mhsmith – 2015-11-07T20:56:16.130
@mhsmith That's possible, assuming that everyone who wanted to use Bitcoin had no alternate way of getting their transaction processed. The other possibility is that some of those users would say, "Screw it, I'm going to use Paypal instead," and the users who needed to use Bitcoin would bid the transaction fee up a little. – Nick ODell – 2015-11-07T21:13:48.853
Could you perhaps add the content from the comments to the answer? Especially since we just got a duplicate of this question it would be nice to cultivate this answer. – Murch – 2016-02-01T21:06:28.973
1Would there be some point to forcing a person who wanted to mine a block with no transactions into having to create their own meaningless dummy transaction? – David Schwartz – 2013-05-29T05:35:31.830
Possible duplicate of If there was a period of time with no transactions, what would miners have to do?
– Nate Eldredge – 2018-02-18T15:16:21.590