Currently the BSV blockchain network is suffering from the presence of a majority hash power that is mining empty blocks on the network.
This is causing a range of problems since transactions are not being included in most blocks. The memory pools which persist transactions which have been generated by users but are yet to be included in a block are becoming full of millions of transactions.
This can cause issues for the various services in the ecosystem as they may not have allocated enough RAM for persisting a mempool of such size, or they may rely on chained transactions which are currently sitting unconfirmed in the mempools.
There has been some commentary from people within BSV industry that miners are within their rights to mine empty blocks and are simply doing so because an economic decision had them deem that the block subsidy itself was sufficient reward and they wouldn’t bother with the workload of validating millions of transactions because the fees are too cheap to justify including them even in aggregate.
Participating in Bitcoin mining enters you into a unilateral contract with the issuer
There is another side to explore in this context, and that is not whether it makes economic sense and respecting the economic rationality of the miner, but rather examining their obligations under a unilateral contract.
A unilateral contract is defined as:
- A contract where one party makes another party an offer to perform an act and assent is promised by performing the act.
- A contract where one party has an enforceable obligation.
In the case of Bitcoin, there exists a unilateral contract between the issuer of the Bitcoin tokens and the nodes that run the network. This unilateral contract was issued by Satoshi Nakamoto with the performance being fulfilling the 6 steps of section 5 in the Bitcoin white paper.
The first step of these steps is ‘1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.’
If a miner is mining empty blocks, they are immediately precluding themselves from having the assent of the party that issued the unilateral contract.
For the contract to be enforceable as per the second definition of unilateral contract, the party attempting to satisfy the terms of the contract has to be performant to the contract that was issued.
While the contract is not defined in a single text document, there are several pieces which together can be construed as aspects of a contractual relationship. The white paper as the technical manifesto for the Bitcoin protocol is one such component.
In the early days of Bitcoin, it was not uncommon for there to be many empty blocks and with low difficulty and no enterprise relying on it, there were often some poorly connected nodes who would miss some transactions. This was expected and rewards were still distributed to them as the block subsidy.
As the system matures and multiple enterprises come to rely on the performance of those miners, wilfully neglecting to include any transactions in a block jeopardises their right to have the terms of the unilateral contract enforced.
There have been some theories circulating that the miner may be doing so as an arbitrage play between decoupled hash rates, asset price and difficulties on the major SHA-256 chains or that it may be an accumulation attempt in anticipation of a court ruling in Norway that might favour a BSV run up in the markets.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the miner is doing so with a bullish outlook on BSV, if they are violating the unilateral contract to achieve that end then they could very well find that efforts are made against them to recover the block rewards they were paid without performing even the first of their contractual obligations.
The steps to run the network, defined in the Bitcoin white paper need to be followed to ensure that users of the electronic cash system can have adequate confidence that the miner network will process transactional events in a timely fashion.
If a miner doesn’t follow those steps, then why should they be entitled to a block reward simply for extending an empty chain?
It might very well be the case that this unknown miner may be one of the first entities to have their coinbase UTXOs frozen with the newly developed Blacklist Manager and missing out on any of the anticipated profits they imagined they were entitled to.
Response from Bitcoin Association
In response to the situation, Bitcoin Association is taking action to contact all relevant exchanges and miners to freeze all block rewards associated with this malicious miner and will be pursuing criminal charges against the entity/entities responsible.
Bitcoin Association encourages this miner to contact Bitcoin Association at legal@bitcoinassociation.net within 24 hours to resolve this dispute.