Bringing back my Acorn of the Day series to post opinions, knowledge and discussion around the Bitcoin Cash space!

I have been wondering for some time now why was Antpool able to mine so many small blocks during the BCH stress test on September 1st of this year.

I posted this question on Reddit and memo without satisfactory answers. Since the transaction count was high that day, miners had an incentive to put as many transactions in a block as possible in order to earn as much BCH as possible. W

Why was it that Antpool (Bitmain) was able to mine so many empty blocks when their competitors, Bitcoin.com, ViaBTC, CoinGeek, BTC.com and BMG Pool were mining much larger blocks?

Here is a link to Antpool's mined blocks that day:

We have 4 blocks mined under 8 KB, comparing to others these are significantly lower than other miners that day.

All blocks mined < 40 KB:

BTC.TOP mined small blocks that day as well, but not nearly as small as AntPool (except 1 4 KB block).

Compare to CoinGeek's:

You can view the other major miner's blocks mined here that day, notice that the vast majority of mined blocks were greater that 1 MB:

ViaBTC:

Bitcoin.com:

BTC.com:

A reasonable explanation I was given in my memo and Reddit posts were that block propagation was an issue - given that AntPool is a relatively large miner and that its competitors did not have this issue to such a degree that would justify outputting tiny blocks I do not think that this was the case.

Yes this could have been an issue that day, but not the reason for mining < 8 kb blocks.

I believe that Bitmain (and BTC.TOP) temporarily moved its BTC hash rate over to Bitcoin Cash to mine nearly empty blocks in order to quickly find a block, taking advantage of other miners putting as many transactions as possible (which imply longer block times) to make a quick profit.

Do I have an issue with this?

No.

This is competition and the free market at work. I wanted to share my thoughts on this as the question had been puzzling me for quite some time.