Can mining empty blocks be more profitable? Statistically Yes.

From the miners perspective, we can see that the average total reward that miners collect in a certain period is made up of 3 different components: the block reward (~89%), the fee reward (2%), and the occasional uncle reward (~9%). To calculate a miner’s average reward per block, the best indicator would be the average of block and uncle rewards (including their respective average fees) — weighted by the miner’s respective uncle rate (since it differs from miner to miner, the network average will do for this example).

It comes out at 3.03 ETH — or around $275 for the current ETH-USD rate (as the date of Dec 11, 2018). This would be how much a miner earns per block. Also, we compared the average producing time of blocks and found that for blocks with less transactions, the average producing time is shorter. For those blocks with or less than 10 transactions, the average block producing time is 9.8 only, while the average time for all blocks since June ( block 5710964 to 6710964) is 14.5 seconds.

Meanwhile the 11,741 empty blocks mined in this period took 13.2 seconds on average.

Besides, as the time is shorter, empty blocks secure miners with a lower possibility of being verified as uncles, but more likely take the advantage of time and become the main chain.

Therefore mining empty blocks rather than normal ones can provide the miners a higher efficiency regarding profit (rewards/time is higher).

Who is mining empty blocks?

With another closer look, we noted that across the past 6 months, there are 103 miners mining those 11,741 empty blocks. The major players among them are as follows: