Bitcoin is known for its robustness, security and predictability. On average, the blockchain creates a new block every ten minutes, and the successful miner is rewarded with 6.25 BTC, which is currently equivalent to $130,000. However, from time to time Bitcoin’s blockchain surprises the community watching it. The surprise didn’t last, because recently the nodes of the network found a completely empty block on it.
The 776,339 block in question was acquired with zero transactions added to the blockchain, which caused great consternation in the crypto community. But how could this happen?
An empty block sounds unbelievable at first, but it is actually a normal phenomenon on the Bitcoin network. The last time such a case occurred was two weeks ago, at block 774,486.
Miners are incentivized to mine blocks as quickly as possible, and sometimes they mine one before they’ve received any transactions they need to include in it. If this happens, the given block will remain empty.
Bitcoin mempool provides a longer explanation to help you understand this. When a new block is found, mining pools send a transactionless block template to miners so they can start searching for the next block as soon as possible. A block template full of transactions is also sent immediately afterwards, but this means more data transfer and takes a bit longer to reach the miners.
And in this intermediate time, which is no more than 1-2 seconds, miners sometimes stumble upon a new block using the empty template. According to some data, the proportion of such blocks on the network is usually around 1-2%.
Well done miners
Even if an empty block contains no transactions, the miner still receives his reward. In the current case, block 776,389 was added to the chain just a few seconds after its predecessor, 776,448. For successful miners, block 776,388 earned an additional 0.086 BTC ($1,854) in reward, added to their 6.25 BTC, $135,247 block reward. And now Binance Pool has become the winner, which has 12% of its total hashrate.
Finally, it is important to note that these empty blocks are not a problem for the network, as it continues to steadily progress towards reaching 21 million BTC.
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