<p>The SpiderPool mining pool closed an empty Bitcoin block at height 954,352. Inside there is only the coinbase transaction with the miner’s reward, but none of the usual user transactions — as noted by the Mempool service. The block weighs 1.16 kWU (kilo weight units), and only 62 seconds separate it from the previous one. Most likely, it was exactly this tiny gap between blocks that led to the block ending up empty.</p>
<p>Empty blocks show up in the Bitcoin network from time to time, though it’s a rare event. The previous case was recorded back in June 2024. Technically, any miner in a Proof-of-Work network is free to close an empty block — the protocol doesn’t forbid it. A single such block breaks nothing: settlements go on, transactions aren’t rolled back, and the consensus rules stay intact. What’s more, pools sometimes send empty templates on purpose — they’re smaller in size and propagate across the network faster, which raises the odds of finding a block first. Yes, the miner loses the transaction fees inside that block, but still keeps the reward for the block itself. In the end, this saves the miner a fair amount of resources.</p>
<p>It also happens that miners churn out empty blocks in batches — this time deliberately. In the autumn of 2022, a separate project ran into this: the Bitcoin SV network. An unidentified miner started mass-producing empty blocks. The association backing the project concluded that he was deliberately covering his tracks: he changed the coinbase string in every block to make his actions harder to trace. It all ended with the blockchain coming under enormous load — millions of transactions piled up in memory, waiting to be included in a block. Some services in the BSV ecosystem simply weren’t built to handle such a flood of data and began to lag or throw errors.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, analysts at JPMorgan estimated the cost of mining a single bitcoin at roughly $78,000. In their view, a growing share of market participants are operating right at the edge of profitability — and therefore increasingly just switch their hardware off.</p>
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