Empty block? Anyone wanna school me on that?
nostr:npub1qtvl2em0llpnnllffhat8zltugwwz97x79gfmxfz4qk52n6zpk3qq87dze found their 4th #Bitcoin block today. Congrats to all miners! Also, oof. It was an empty block. 
Discussion
It means they missed out on all the txn fees that would be in a full block.
So they just get the blow reward but no extras. Got it. Is that a common thing?
Yeah it happens fairly frequently. In theory it should happen exactly proportionally to the amount of time it takes to download the block template to the average block time. So as an example if it takes 4 seconds for the block to download to miners and the average block time is 10 minutes then on average 0.67% of blocks found will be empty.
Yes, but if they had discarded the empty block template that they HAD found a valid hash on, and then started trying to find a valid hash for the template that included all the transactions, they very likely would not have been lucky enough to find it, and therefore lost out on not only the transaction fees, but the block reward as well.
Block reward without transaction fees beats risking not getting either any day.
Luke's explanation on bird app https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1741967158282686683
Generally speaking, we have empty blocks being found quite often. When a new block is found, mining pools send miners a block template with no transactions so they can start searching for the next block as soon as possible. They send a block template full of transactions right afterward, but a full block template is a bigger data transfer and takes slightly longer to reach miners. In this intervening time, which is usually no more than 1-2 seconds, miners sometimes get lucky and find a new block using the empty block template.
Thank you for that explanation. It makes sense seeing that it’s a race. Why not try the fastest option as soon as possible. What’s the average transaction fee per block? Or how much is lost when the empty block is rewarded vs a normal block?