- The small increase in the weights of the blocks among these pools suggests minor additions of transactions by miners after building a block template.
I was surprised by this. I initially looked at SBI Crypto and noticed that their max block weight of 3,993,047 WU minus the max coinbase weight of 716 WU is 3,992,331 WU. That’s 331 WU more than the soft-maximum of 3,992,000 WU I was expecting. Looking at all pools, it seems it’s quite often around that 331 number, never more though.
| Pool Name | max block weight | max coinbase weight | weight above 3,992,000 | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundry USA | 3993523 | 1192 | 331 | |
| Binance Pool | 3993768 | 1440 | 328 | |
| MARA Pool | 3994944 | 904 | 2040 | block with big inscription |
| Luxor | 3993811 | 1480 | 331 | |
| AntPool | 3993918 | 1612 | 306 | |
| ViaBTC | 3993612 | 1284 | 328 | |
| Poolin | 3993613 | 1336 | 277 | |
| Braiins Pool | 3993416 | 1124 | 292 | |
| SBI Crypto | 3993047 | 716 | 331 | |
| Ultimus Pool | 3993768 | 1440 | 328 | |
| BTC-com | 3993781 | 1472 | 309 | |
| SpiderPool | 3993616 | 1288 | 328 | |
| WhitePool | 3993631 | 1304 | 327 | |
| Ocean.xyz | 3990301 | 9272 | -10971 | Ocean doesn’t use the default |
| EMCDPool | 3993428 | 1304 | 124 | |
| Pega Pool | 3993018 | 688 | 330 | |
| Titan | 3993020 | 696 | 324 | |
| KuCoin Pool | 3993504 | 1316 | 188 | |
| Terra Pool | 3993172 | 844 | 328 | |
| CleanIncentive | 3993038 | 728 | 310 | |
| 1THash | 3993412 | 1084 | 328 | |
| NiceHash | 3993148 | 820 | 328 | |
| CKPool | 3993181 | 856 | 325 |
I’d be surprised if this is really due to ALL pools adding extra transactions AFTER they got a template from Bitcoin Core. That seems risky (why not do it with prioritizetransaction?) and I haven’t noticed this in any of the blocks processed by my miningpool-observer project.
Is there possibly more to it?