Are mining pools colluding?

I was browsing mempool.space and stumbled upon something odd. Check out ViaBTC pool: 54 out of 94 blocks mined by ViaBTC in the past week weren’t full, which is 56% of the blocks. Now look at F2Pool: 68 out of 112 blocks they mined were not full, so that’s 61%. Next is SBI Crypto: Out of 20 blocks they mined, 13 were not full, or 65%. Then we have Ocean pool: 6 out of 10 blocks mined by them were incomplete, meaning 50%. Foundry USA: They have an interesting case every single block (over 360) mined in the last week was full. Not one block was below 100%. Ant Pool: Also, they had over 170 blocks, and not a single one was under 100% full. SpiderPool: Surprisingly, 100% of their 173 blocks mined last week were full too. It seems statistically improbable that so many miners would have over half of their blocks not full while a few major miners have 100% full blocks. What’s going on here? Could there be a cartel among the big pools intentionally filling their blocks with a ton of useless op_return transactions? What’s the reasoning behind that? I see this as an attack on the nodes, intentionally overwhelming them with pointless transactions. Just something to think about.

I notice recent block mined by 4 of them have good health, so i decided to check further. Looking at their most recent non-full block[1-4], all of them seems to exclude few kinds of TX Marginal fee rate (TX with fee rate below 1 sat/vB)Recently broadcastedRecently CPFPed From quick view, it seems what actually happen is some pool refuse to include TX with fee rate below 1 sat/vB. [1] https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000019e9c4d0c010e4c2d4a703519af4166f2d029abde6ade [2] https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000119f5312aa5d4c31fa37f76ad27ec883876f792f86bf3 [3] https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000119f5312aa5d4c31fa37f76ad27ec883876f792f86bf3 [4] https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000001228d9d27470aca14394de35b2aa15650a7eae3435e8f

It's about time pools started doing that. Allowing fees to dive to the bottom is good for no one! Is them doing it the result of a cartel - no. It is simply them collectively coming to their senses.

here is a link to a thread about low fees. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5562781.0 I was able to do fees at: 0.91 sats a byte  https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/c5380d18e25bcd914a8b4e696d1da27d39ad3272cdd5bc842dd7ba5d63c824a7 0.80 sats a byte https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/d5673baed165acdfd40141221660b5345d6fe8aa632f020bda6ecbe6686dfde1 0.70 sats a byte https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/fd4ace85e016ef1400365d079ee42c72c9ef9c75400a1ae325497bd65297ef1c 0.60 sats a byte https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/239e9c54cb2560b53cd188e075ecb72e80b2e3ae3ee32dacb19aebf0f38c7e03 0.50 sats a byte   https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/90b027ed518eb209313d5a178c08b8fddcafdaaae6d73c370dfaf6c8f36feca7           0.40 sats a byte   https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/f536f2d6310c307f4b75b0098a3dacdd7c07c54a63ff13c7f271fa2fa9db919d         0.3 sats a byte  https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/5253654b0428c4a901fe74d9fda97f0fb9640d87cd4017a9a454dfbce92065f9       0.2  sats a byte https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/1bce33b0dca55c8e3ea143730ccb5970f94577ba3fe89c1aea292ee0368ae610 ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ only the 0.11 did not get done it is now at 22 days 0.11         https://btc1.trezor.io/tx/91e4670c066df703d756d9ff6bcf95566585ff4e872d19c75a929c4f697c3395     __________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ most others were done at 10 minutes or less

something fishy is going on within the network forsure.

Agreed, some pools are not taking sub 1 sat/vB transactions. I just sent a TX and took whatever the default was on the wallet and the last 2 blocks mined were by F2 who ignored it since it was under 1 sat/vB My bad, I know better but was not paying attention. Does not matter when it gets mined so no big deal. I'm sure sooner or later they are going have to either accept transaction under 1 sat/vB or have some blocks that are really empty on a regular basis like this one: https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000072fdeb342a61d084758430c5a9fc1f512dadc4ebd81f?page=1 -Dave

A section literally called "Mining". Some mining pools are just not taking low-fee transactions, below 1 sat/vB. Because they don't have to. Exactly. Fully-filled blocks with just 1 sat/vB would mean 0.01 BTC in fees per block. If it will be lowered to 0.1 sat/vB, then it means 100k sats per block. If the basic block reward will be halved, and the fees will be too low, then the end result will be just like in testnet3: 1192 satoshis per block, and low fees, would lead to a low difficulty. So, it is a question about long-term incentives: if the current fees will be lower and lower, then how they will raise, when it will be needed? Because users will happily pay one satoshi per transaction, so if we assume 250 vB per transaction, and 4k transactions per block, it would mean 4k satoshis as a reward from fees. And then, who will mine a block worth 4k satoshis in the future? Or: how easy it would be to reorganize the chain? Or even: how many confirmations will be needed?

Additional fee from TX (with low fee rate) is extremely low compared with current block reward though, less than 0.1% from my rough calculation. CMIIW, but it seems you have no interest to discuss what you noticed. FWIW it took about a decade before Bitcoin Core change default minrelaytxfee from 1 sat/vB to 0.1 sat/vB. So i don't expect we'll see another decrease in a decade. For long term incentive, people usually hope or assume that Bitcoin price will continue to rise or block size limit will be increased in the future.

I wrongly thought that after the last halving some of the larger miners would drop out. If there is any sliver of profit to be made people will still mine to get that fraction of a penny. At least for now. -Dave

In short: Foundry, Antpool and Spiderpool support the reduction in default fee rate at 0.1 sat/vb, while the rest are still skeptical. Hm? How so? There are so many spam transactions that pay under 1 sat/vb but pay infinitely more than the fees of an empty block. Allowing another pool to claim that money is just waste for your miners.

Which is quite understandable from a miners perspective  (although I dont agree) If most miners rejected such transactions,  they will make more money in long run Even if they are mining not full blocks now, they may just refuse those few bucks from cheap transactions... not big deal for them

Would they really do, though? I would consider that many of the transactions paying 0.1 sat/vb wouldn't have been made in the first place, if it weren't possible. They are created because it's economically permitted. I'm sure there are transactions that pay less than 1 sat/vb and would have been broadcasted even with 10 sat/vb if that was the minimum, but would miners really make more money over the long term if 10 sat/vb was the mempool minimum? I think the opposite. Many retail bitcoin users would simply switch to a more economic payment system overtime.

not sure there are a lot of btc retail transactions. the world has 8 billion people if it did a tx on the mainchain for 1/1000 of us that would be  8 million tx a day. we are not close to that many. For a lot of reasons. we have the store of wealth it is rare group (hodl) and the p2p group and we simply do not have enough people that want to do p2p. due to the hodl store of wealth people.

I don't think. Bitcoin is already so cheap at 1 sat vB Take a look at ethereum, solana, they are not much cheaper. Basically the same... ethereum is even more expensive. And even solana isn't a good coin the receive money. Would you hold that shit for months? you got convert it to a better coin

Bitcoin is cheap currently at 1 sat/vb. One day, it was cheap to transact at 10 sat/vb. It's surely a great choice to send and receive money with only 1 sat/vb, but consolidation for example might get expensive, even at 1 sat/vb. A vendor might prefer using a third party, or some other crypto instead due to that reason. If he can pay 0.1 sat/vb, though, it's back paying miners. So, from a miner's perspective, uplifting the limit, as if they were a cartel, does not guarantee a greater reward. It would surely result in more people paying above the limit over the short term, but over the long term, I can't say the same. More like the opposite.

Relax yourself. The problem is I no longer have access to the email this account was created with. So I don't get notified of replies. And besides, I lose interest in a threat once the retard mods move it to a section with fewer eye balls. Here is what I believe is happening. Some miners are willingly lowering fees in order to fill their blocks. Even though those sub 1 sat txs are all spammy op_return inscriptions. A rough estimate tells me about a million of those inscriptions are being mined on btc every week. They are not showing up on any of the spam index and spam explorer sites I know. This makes me think that either the miners are creating the spam themselves to fill their blocks, at the detriment of nodes. Or it's some kind of money laundering scheme. Either way, a miner on good behavior would decide those are all span and return his fees to 1 sat/vbyte or more. It's simple. Those miners don't care if all the transactions are below 1 sat, and are all spam, and the gain in fees is minimal. They don't even care about their reputation in the space. They are effectively facilitating spam.

Starting with: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5382906.msg66205884#msg66205884 so if some things I post are not in my normal style It's the pain meds talking. And Pepe I have you on ignore since more or less we are never going to agree on this but I do get notified of replies so I saw this. Not all, many of us are using lower fees. There has even been a bunch of discussion about consolidating dust. Over the weekend I moved a large large amount of dust transactions into a still mostly worthless but now can at least buy a cup of coffee when I spend it and now it would be just 1 input when sending. Because what else was I going to do while sitting around. Beyond that NOT having those TXs in blocks that a pool mines so long as the pool pays TX fees is going to cost the miners money and eventually they will move to a pool that pays them more. Picking on blocks 929015 - 929016 - 929017 015 and 017 were mined by pools that include everything. 016 was not 015 had fees of $2764 016 had fees of $778 017 had fees of $2550 YES I KNOW it's not a perfect example but you are still talking about $1800 +/- left on the table that could have been split by the miners. Pennies per smaller miner I know but pennies add up. For larger miners that can add up to real money. Not to mention for VERY large miners it becomes a fiduciary responsibility to use a pool that will shove every last TX onto a block and for a pool its also their fiduciary responsibility to get every last TX into a block. No idea why you are not seeing them in explorers before they are in blocks. They all show up in my local explorers. But since some nodes still ignore sub 1 sat /VB tx they could just be ignoring them. On the subject of pools / miners that is also why more and more most people are only mining on PPS and PPS variant pools. You submit a share you get paid. All the other variations can cost you money due to internet issues. Be it local or between you and the pool or whatever. There were some pools that you could not connect to a couple of weeks ago when Amazon had their problems. And guess what, those people using PPLNS to connect to them took a hit. A big hit. Now back to a tin foil hat nutjob theory of mine. When connecting to a pool using stratum.yourpool.com do a nslookup on the IP address of it. Do you REALLY want to be going through Microsoft servers or Amazon servers or Google servers to mine? Or using a pool that has their own IP space and uses their own equipment. Would like to see p2pool development get back going again. But that is going to be a major uphill battle. And ow ow f---ing ow Time for more meds. -Dave -Dave

All? You obviously ignore people who want to send Bitcoin or consolidate their UTXO at reallly low cost. Sound possible. When i write this post, https://www.ord.io/?range=1Week says about 790 thousand inscription created in last one week. But that website also shows it's being indexed and shown to people. Most miner mostly care about maximizing profit, so it's not surprising. IMO miner and mining pool will get away unless they do something more hostile such as 51% attack, selfish attack or attack where they mostly mine empty block.

On a cursory look, I was NOT able to find any sub 1 sat tx. I'm sure I could find some if I looked hard and long enough. But I would estimate over 98-99% of the sub 1 sat tx are spam. That's when nodes are supposed to come in and tell the miners what they are allowed to mine. That's the whole point if filters. But coretards are too busy trying to conform the nodes mempool to what miners want. I'm not familiar with anything about Stratum being connected or having anything hosted on Amazon servers. So I can't speak to that issue. But Ocean miners are FAR FAR FAR more decentralized than others who are mere hashers, not actual miners. They sell their hash power to the pool, and the pool mines for them, construct the block template, and decides everything that goes into the block. The hasher can always go hash for an other poll, but aside from Ocean, they all operate the same way. That is a major centralization problem. When a handful of corporations decide what goes into a block. With Ocean, miners construct their own template. And they pay a cheaper pool fee, 1% instead of 2% if they run Datum, which further decentralizes mining. Individual miners decide what goes into a block, not the pool. Furthermore, all the other pools enforce full KYC on their hashers. Ocean doesn't do any KYC on anyone. Thought I'm told a couple of them willingly do it. Probably a couple of stupid ones. [moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

I was using Amazon as one of many examples. Except for a few locations when you connect to mine.ocean.xyz you are talking to either Microsoft or Google. So for the most part every share you submit to ocean Microsoft or Google get to take a look at it. See here: https://dnschecker.org/#A/mine.ocean.xyz Mining at a pool that allows for custom blocks runs the risk of costing you money. There could be some nice fat fees sitting in the mempool that some miner for whatever reason does not want to include in the block they mine. Which means those fees don't get paid to everyone else either. Or if for whatever reason they construct a block that is not valid for whatever reason you could loose the entire thing. Not saying that it can't happen to blocks made by pools either, just that it's less likely. Solo mining, fine put in whatever you want. Pool mining cram in every last piece of data you can that pays. None of the pools I mine at have any form of kyc. All they have is either an email address or a BTC address. -Dave