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.

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.

Questions:

• 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.

As I said, the main question of this dashboard is: what blocks do miners prefer to mine? The above chart shows us how many blocks are mined by each number of transactions (the x-axis represent the number of transaction per block and the y-axis represent the number of blocks with this number of transactions).

As you can see, totally, the number of blocks with a low number of transactions is more than the number of blocks with a high number of transactions.

We need to define categories for the following analysis so I defined distribution and called below 200 transactions per block, between 200 and 800 transactions per block, and more than 800 transactions per block respectively as blocks with low, medium, and high numbers of transactions.

Most of the miners (84.1%) prefer to mine blocks with low number of transactions.

14.7% mined block with medium number of transactions.

1.12% mined blocks with high number of transactions.

As I said, most of the blocks (80.4%) have low number of transactions (less than 200 transactions per block).

19.6% of blocks have medium number of transactions (between 200 and 800 transactions per block).

less than 0.01% of blocks have high number of transactions (more than 800 transactions per block).

These charts show us the overviews of mined blocks and the number of transactions of them.

As you can see:

• The number of unique miners was decreasing until October 2016, but from that date until today, it is always around 50 per day.
• The total number of transactions in a day was initially increasing steadily and recorded a peak in January 2018. After that, it declined. This downward trend lasted until January 2020, but after that, it began to increase and even surpassed its 2018 peak.
• The daily average number of transactions per block has a similar trend to the total number of transactions.
• The number of blocks mined by miners increased and since Oct 2017 has stable status. Also, there are some drops on the chart. For example:
  • Jan and Feb 2019
  • Nov and Dec 2019
  • May and Jun 2022

It might be interesting to know what the top miners (based on the number of blocks they have mined) prefer so far. Mine the blocks with low, medium or high number of transactions?

So, I found the top 10 miners and count the number of their mines in each category.

As you can see among top miners, there are some who mined blocks with high number of transactions but their count is insignificant compared to the other two categories (blocks with low or medium number of transactions).

Here I found miners with more than 90% of their mines are blocks that fall into one category (low, medium, or normal transaction count).

This chart shows the distribution of the above table.

As you can see:

• There is only one miner that more than 90% of the blocks she/he mined have a high number of transactions.
• There are 843 miners that have more than 90% of the blocks they have mined have a low number of transactions.
• There are 9 miners that have more than 90% of the blocks they have mined have a medium number of transactions.

Conclusion:

• The number of blocks with a low number of transactions is more than the number of blocks with a high number of transactions.
• Most of the miners (84.1%) prefer to mine blocks with a low number of transactions.
• Most of the top miners (based on the number of blocks they have mined) prefer to mine blocks with a low number of transactions.
• There is only one miner that more than 90% of the blocks she/he mined have a high number of transactions.
• There are 843 miners that have more than 90% of the blocks they have mined have a low number of transactions.
• There are 9 miners that have more than 90% of the blocks they have mined have a medium number of transactions.

Reference:

Solution:

To answer this question, I used ethereum.core.fact_blocks table. The approach I followed in this dashboard was to first have an overview of the blocks and the number of transactions in each block. Then let's go to the main question of this dashboard, that is, what blocks do miners prefer to mine? Blocks with low, medium, or high numbers of transactions.

For this purpose, we obtained the number of blocks with any specific number of transactions. Based on that, I defined distribution and called below 200 transactions per block, between 200 and 800 transactions per block, and more than 800 transactions per block respectively as blocks with low, medium, and high numbers of transactions.

In the next step, I obtained the top 10 miners based on the number of blocks they mined and checked whether they preferred to mine blocks with a low, medium, or high number of transactions.

The last thing I checked was which miners had more than 90% of their mines from one category of blocks (blocks with low, medium, or high transaction numbers).

Let’s see the results.