Try Quests to earn cryptoFlash Bounty: Miners
Do certain miners prefer mining blocks with lower transaction count? Do certain miners only mine blocks with high transaction count? You can define what can be considered low or high transaction count based on the transaction count distribution
Introduction
In this dashboard we analyzed ethereum miners and what are they doing on blockchain and what is their decision making.
WHAT IS ETHEREUM MINING?
==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. This is appropriate to the extent that in Ethereum too, the only mode of issuance post launch is via mining. Unlike these examples however, mining is also the way to secure the network by creating, verifying, publishing and propagating blocks in the blockchain.
Mining ether = Securing the Network
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, currently uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Mining is the lifeblood of proof-of-work. Ethereum miners - computers running software - using their time and computation power to process transactions and produce blocks.
WHY DO MINERS EXIST?
In decentralized systems like Ethereum, we need to ensure that everyone agrees on the order of transactions. Miners help this happen by solving computationally difficult puzzles to produce blocks, securing the network from attacks.
link for more info.
Method
At first we analyzed total mining stats on ethereum blockchain like total blocks, total difficulty and etc, you will see =)
Then we analyzed top 10 blocks that created on ethereum over time by difficulty and number of transactions and do the same thing for top 10 miners but instead of difficulty we used the blocks they mined over time
I used ethereum.core.fact_blocks table for all of the data that i analyzed and they are over time
Observations
As we see in the charts i think the maximum number of transactions that a block can handle is 1431 and After that it is not worth using anymore.
The block with the highest number of transactions is “13002929”
and the top 10 blocks actually have the same number of transactions and their so close to each other .(1425-1431)
The difficulty of these blocks are almost the same and most of them formed 10% of pie chart
Observations
The miner with address : 0xea674fdde714fd979de3edf0f56aa9716b898ec8 has the highest number of transactions with a massive number of 459M
and its almost 170M more than the second miner. This address formed 35.1% in the pie chart above between the top 10 miners by transactions.
The same miner with highest transactions, has also the highest number of mined blocks, it shows that he has been so active and profitable for the blockchain and also for himself too.
This address mined over 3.26M blocks and made 459M transactions and its the first and biggest ethereum miner by stats.
Monthly ETH Miners and Mined Blocks
Observations
Aug 2015 had the highest number of transactions and after that number of miners decreased badly because the difficulty increased and mining got harder on ethereum.
After 2017 eth had 100 average of miners monthly.
Although the number of miners decreased, the number of mined blocks was not affected by it, which means that at that time the few miners who remained were mining instead of other miners.
> # Miners Transactions Distribution
Observations
As we see in these charts most of the miners made only 1-10 transactions and the number of miners is so close to 10-100.
There isnt so many miners with more than 1000 transactions and its only 49 of them.
It is interesting that most of ETH miners have less than 100 transactions and when the network gets too busy or difficulty increases, they give up mining because its not profitable for them in several reasons(could be their poor setup or Electricity costs and etc)
Key Insights
- Mining is not that easy on ethereum and has so many challenges for miners
- Maximum number of transactions on a block is 1431
- Top 10 Blocks by transactions all have more than 1425 transactions and the first one has 1431
0xea674fdde714fd979de3edf0f56aa9716b898ec8this address was so active in eth mining and made 459M transactions and mined over 3.26 blocks- Aug 2015 had the highest number of miners and after that it decreased so bad
- Sep 2017 mined blocks decreased 20% from its last month(Aug 2017)
- Most of ETH miners have less than 100 transactions(84.5%)
Thoughts on Miners Behavior
As we see in the charts above and i mentioned earlier most of miners made under 100 transactions so we can name blocks as low transaction count and above 100 is high transaction count.
It is obvious that miners choose blocks with low transactions to mine because they are less busy and have less difficulty to mine and they are easier to mine than busy blocks with high transactions.
You can see in the chart that most of months low transaction count is more than high transaction count.