# Great Consensus Cleanup Revival

**URL:** <https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-consensus-cleanup-revival/710>\
**Category:** Protocol Design\
**Created:** [March 24, 2024, 5:29pm UTC](https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-consensus-cleanup-revival/710 "2024-03-24T17:29:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![ajtowns](https://delvingbitcoin.org/user_avatar/delvingbitcoin.org/ajtowns/32/417_2.png) [@ajtowns](https://delvingbitcoin.org/u/ajtowns)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2024, 4:10am UTC](https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/great-consensus-cleanup-revival/710/6 "2024-03-28T04:10:29Z")

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> [@benthecarman](#):
>
> Wouldn’t this not work for the occasional empty block?

An empty block can only claim the subsidy as the reward, which won’t equal the ~25 or ~50 BTC reward that all the potential duplicates claimed, so it wouldn’t be a duplicate in any event, even if they were given an exemption.

But an exemption isn’t necessary: empty blocks can include a witness commitment, it’ll just be constant (as the coinbase tx’s wtxid is replaced by `uint256{0}`, eg [mempool - Bitcoin Explorer](https://mempool.space/signet/tx/d62676348ef1dfa05f8c5380bcccb1dc8c1bea4877e50495d577fd4f4c2f09e5) (a block with only the coinbase, the coinbase has the usual `uint256{0}` “witness reserved value” as its witness data, it has the witness commitment of `aa21a9ed e2f61c3f71d1defd3fa999dfa36953755c690689799962b48bebd836974e8cf9` followed by the signet block signature. You can see other empty blocks have the same witness commitment, eg [mempool - Bitcoin Explorer](https://mempool.space/signet/tx/cdf494066c05d46aa0ba0b9c2eab872d3a343f22f8b7a011c24a05e0ebc2d84b)

EDIT to add: all the coinbases from the list in comment 4 have an nLocktime of 0 and an nVersion of 1, so requiring future blocks to have some different value for one or the other would also result in uniqueness.

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