Did f2pool fix their block template issues? \ stacker news ~mempool

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Did f2pool fix their block template issues?

216 sats \ 3 comments \ @sudocarlos 11 Aug mempool

Saw some posts by mononaut about some mostly-empty blocks they mined about 6 days ago. Another cropped up 4 days ago which wasn't as bad: https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000005f413af0fc53ec4cb2a638b877dcc05f48ea3ced3db9

Anyway, i'd like to speculate/discuss whats going on here. What kind of game are they playing and how fo the hashers using the pool feel about it?

https://m.stacker.news/45131

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142 sats \ 1 reply \ @quark 11 Aug

There isn't any issue. Empty or almost empty blocks can just happen. You cannot wait for the full template to be defined.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudocarlos OP 11 Aug

They werent empty. They were 25-75% filled. Empty blocks already make sense to me. They send the empty templates to hashers as soon as a block is found and being validated and before a new full block has been constructed. But a partly filled block when there are over 200k txs to choose from of varying sizes just doesnt make sense.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudocarlos OP 11 Aug

I think someone is playing around with optimizations for choosing txs and finding bugs. No better test environment than production/mainnet!

I also assume that they were sending these janky block templates to all hashers in the pool, but maybe now they're sending it to a smaller subset? Or they fixed their issue. Or they stopped. All recent blocks have been as expected per bitcoin core, which is good to see. Definitely appreciate mempool.space displaying all of this info so plainly for a lay bitcoiner like me to understand.

Doubt this was malicious, but I feel like it could have been a test that leads to malicious behavior later.