What are the benefit of mining an empty block Something peculiar just happened on the newly mined block number 655534, it contain only the coinbase transaction, nothing else.
I have searched for a similar question but only found this one Why there are blocks with single transaction in blockchain?
But the answer is kind of vague with a &quot; we dont really know &quot;
Here is the concerned block: https://btc.com/000000000000000000028f1ea0a3ccfac982eb53c1bd2d3d20695af87ffacaaf
Miners aren't forced to include transactions in their blocks even though they're incentivized by fee to do so.
The main cause for empty blocks is spy mining, as there's normally always something in the mempool! I don't see an answer on here containing 'spy mining' so here we go :)
Spy mining is when pools try to minimize time spent hashing an out of date block. A spy miner monitors the work other pools give out to miners (by registering a miner there)
If one of those pools starts working on new work, pointing to a block the spy miner has never seen before, he interprets it as the network has accepted that block and everyone else has moved on.
However, the spy miner hasn't received or validated this block so he doesn't know what transactions were applied, and hence is uncertain about the state of the UTXO set. If he includes a conflicting transaction in his block, his entire block will be rejected. So his safest chance of succeeding is to not add any transactions except the coinbase.
Eventually his software will receive the block, and the pool will include transactions in newly issued work.
This is slightly at odds with the timestamp on the block (30 minutes after the previous one), but it's hard to know.