Are miners gaming the network for their own gain?

I've been checking out the mempool lately, and it's pretty cool to see how blocks are being mined and all that. But it got me thinking can miners actually mess with the network to give themselves an advantage with fake incentives? So, here’s why I’m curious. If you look at some blocks in the image up top, there are a few blocks with fewer than 500 transactions, while on other days, we see blocks handling anywhere from 2000 to 3000 transactions. What’s up with the mining process? Right now, there are over 50,000 transactions waiting in 212 blocks, so why aren’t more transactions being packed into each block to help clear this backlog? So, my main question is: do miners manipulate things to maximize their rewards?

A block has not a limit for an X amount of transactions. Each block has a maximum capacity in Megabytes. Since some transactions will take more MB then others (a transaction that is made of many inputs has more MB then a transaction that is made out of one input) you will have different amounts of transactions in each block. Since miners want to have maximum profit they will fill the block with as many high fee transactions as possible. This is somehow a manipulation yes, but will result in high fee transactions being processed faster than low fee transactions. SO yes in a way the miners are manipulating the blocks to get the maximum payment, but you can easily go with that and simply put a high TX Fee.

The number of transactions in a block is not fixed and can vary based on the size of each transaction and the number of transactions being processed at a given time. Originally, the intention was for the block size to be determined by the total size of bytes in the block, rather than a set number of transactions. This means that a block can contain a smaller number of large transactions or a larger number of smaller transactions, depending on the specific transactions being processed at that time. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining Given the limited block size, how do you suggest miners should go about including all the pending transactions in the blocks? How exactly? Miners may prioritize certain transactions with higher transaction fees, as they receive the fees as part of their reward for adding the block to the blockchain. That's pretty much it.

Do you know how simple this whole thing could have been for you? You could have clicked on each of those blocks, and you would have seen of what kind of transactions they are made This is block 78125 https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000011ef297eba02f6404963c45be19a82ae535f201d510ed and 78127 https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000006035c9facf32d5e44def82a45df9335db7a527b0237be one has 406, one has 2218 but they have 3.99 MWU and 4 MWU in size. The limit is not the number of tx, the limit is the space they occupy. Going by your own logic, how would they manipulate the network to get more money when they would be refusing transactions?  This is not manipulation, this is how BTC was designed to work, and there isn't any other way to do it.

Don't get me wrong, it is completely how bitcoin was designed. It was just the answer to the question of OP. The miners can choose which transactions they like and they could even ignore specific transactions. This is how bitcoin was designed, but it is also a possibility to manipulate. The miners can for example also ignore a transaction with a very high fee rate, just because they don't like the sending or receiving address for example.

... except no one does it coz greed rules the bitcoin transaction space by design and it works. On a very few occasions some pools have attempted to implement transaction bias, but since none of the other pools are stupid enough to follow their examples, the ideas end up being ignored and disappearing.

I have seen empty blocks on the ethereum blockchain. It is possible in the Bitcoin blockchain that if the miners go on strike when 78% of the hashrate is on 5 large mining pools, then this will be real fun. For example, if mining is not profitable, then can large miners take such a step to fill blocks only with transactions with high commissions?

The mempool can be a useful tool to monitor the status of transactions on the network, but it's not always an accurate representation of the overall health of the network. There are many factors that can affect the speed and efficiency of transaction processing, including network congestion, transaction fees, and miner activity. It's important to look at multiple sources of data and to understand the underlying mechanics of the network to get a complete picture.

Yes they could do it, but then the blocks would probably be half empty, so they would loose money. The low TX Fee transactions would then be processed by other pools that then would have full blocks. Even with 50% hash power you would only double the time for low TX Fee transactions.

Correct me if I am wrong but what I know is Miner can add their transaction to a certain block like this, is this considered as manipulation too? https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000001d08cb5438ba02b64bcea536c0e94051eeb32b211408

Usually I will say that it's 50% possibility of Manipulation In market because in late 2017 when a simple miner could make 0.5 Bitcoin at that time we saw that there was news that Bitcoin miners have been shut down in china, that result in crash of Bitcoin price and that could have been alarming.... Now a days Bitcoin is a crypto where mining difficulty is so much that if miners shut down their mining machine than they could be in loss and thus they have to run so that they get their investment back nevertheless to make some profit. So I think now a days it do not depends of Bitcoin miners. Let's see what will happen in the future.