Here’s a pretty telling graph. The data comes from mempool.guide aka “the sane” Bitcoin explorer - a fork of mempool.space with a sanity filter.

They took the known “block health” metric and made it to roughly represent how much spam there is in any given block. Higher percentage = cleaner block. Lower = more trash. You can also check the average block health per mining pool over time.

Now, this is what the data shows. Spoiler: we’ve got a serious spam problem, even though blocks are still mostly empty. And yeah, it’s painfully obvious which pools give a damn.

What surprised me? MARA isn’t actually the worst offender. Not by much, but still others are somehow worse.