The Question

• Do certain miners prefer mining blocks with lower transaction count? 
• Do certain miners only mine blocks with high transaction count? 

Approach

Items provided in this dashboard

• weekly / total txs & total unique miners & average tx per block & Block count
• correlation between ETH price and average tx per block
• correlation between ETH price and tot miners
• correlation between ETH price and total transactions
• Mothly % change in Number of Blocks
• Mothly % change in Number of Unique Miners
• Distribution of miners based on tx_count
• Distribution of miners by tx_count
• correlation between tx count and tot miners
• tot number of miners by type (single or multiple type)
• share of unique miners by type

Introduction

A blockchain is a public database that is updated and shared across many computers in a network.

"Block" refers to data and state being stored in consecutive groups known as "blocks". If you send ETH to someone else, the transaction data needs to be added to a block to be successful.

"Chain" refers to the fact that each block cryptographically references its parent. In other words, blocks get chained together. The data in a block cannot change without changing all subsequent blocks, which would require the consensus of the entire network.

Blocks are batches of transactions with a hash of the previous block in the chain. This links blocks together (in a chain) because hashes are cryptographically derived from the block data. This prevents fraud, because one change in any block in history would invalidate all the following blocks as all subsequent hashes would change and everyone running the blockchain would notice

Mining is the process of creating a block of transactions to be added to the Ethereum blockchain. The word mining originates in the context of the gold analogy for crypto currencies. Gold or precious metals are scarce, so are digital tokens, and the only way to increase the total volume is through mining.

Findings - part 1

• Number of daily mining transactions had experienced a sharp jump on late April 2017 and still kept its upward trend. Number of daily miners has not experienced much fluctuation since April 2017 but in terms of Average tx per block, a sharp increasing can be seen on Jan 2020.
• correlation between ETH price and average tx per block is ==positive
• correlation between ETH price and tot miners in ==negative==.
• correlation between ETH price and total transactions is ==positive==.

• In the side graphs, two types of miners are defined and the single type has only worked in one group (below 30 or above 30 transactions). And the multi type has worked in both groups. The presented graphs show that the majority of miners, that is, nearly 79%, have worked in only one group and only 21% have worked in both groups.
  • **Key Findings **
    • Most of miners prefer mining blocks with lower transaction count.
    • Most of miners (~80%) only mine blocks in the group they chose first (in this dashboard , groups where under or above 30 tx per block)

Part 2

In this section of the dashboard, the relationship between the number of transactions in each block and the number of users is checked. In simpler words, we want to check if users are interested in blocks with high or low transaction count. And whether different users participated in both high and low transactions or just preferred to participate in one type?

To answer the above questions, first, the distribution of miners is presented according to the number of block transactions. According to the results, more than half of the miners (nearly 60 percent of them) have operated in blocks with less than 30 transactions. ==So I have set 30 as the basis for determining the number of transactions and, in fact, the boundary between high and low transactions.

Also, looking at the graph of correlation between tx count and tot miners, we notice that there is a relatively strong negative correlation between tx count and tot miners. This means that as the number of transactions increases, the number of miners decreases.