F2Pool responds: The recent claim that mining pools generate “empty blocks” that pose a threat to Ethereum is very wrong

In response to the AMBCrypto report today that "the number of empty blocks mined by Ethereum has increased dramatically in the past three months. According to Alex Svanevik, chief data scientist at CoinFi, this is caused by illegal mining sites using "spy mining" technology, and F2Pool and Etherdigg have such behavior", F2Pool responded that the recent spread of the saying that the "empty blocks" generated by mining pools will pose a threat to Ethereum is very wrong. The author did not have a thorough understanding of the Ethereum mining process and made such a conclusion. In fact, when the block height changes, due to network communication delays, if the mining pool chooses to calculate the transaction first and then issue the task, the mining machine will waste computing power for 1-2 seconds. Therefore, in order to protect the interests of miners from loss, the mining pool will issue a task without a transaction as soon as possible, and then reissue a task with a transaction 1-2 seconds later. If a mining machine calculates a share that meets the difficulty within 1-2 seconds after the task without a transaction is issued, then this block is an empty block. On etherscan, you can see that the top three mainstream mining pools all have this mechanism.

For example:

ethermine https://etherscan.io/block/6470100;

sparkpool https://etherscan.io/block/6470123 https://etherscan.io/block/6470122;

f2pool https://etherscan.io/block/6470136

In addition, the mining pool itself is unwilling to generate empty blocks. After all, transaction fees are also a considerable income.