Are mining pools colluding on transaction fees?

So I was browsing a mining stats site and spotted something odd. ViaBTC mined a bunch of blocks lately, 54 out of 94 weren’t full. That’s over half not filled.

F2Pool is in the same boat. Out of 112 blocks they’ve mined, 68 were not full. Like, what’s going on with that?

SBI Crypto is even worse, 13 out of 20 blocks mined were incomplete. And Ocean pool isn't far behind, just 6 out of 10 filled!

I noticed that blocks from these pools often skip certain transaction types. It looks like they refuse to take transactions with very low fees like under 1 sat/vB.

Yeah, it’s about time they do that. Letting fees drop to nothing doesn't help anyone really.

Not a cartel move, just them realizing they need to make some changes.

There's a thread here about low fees if you wanna check it out. I even managed to get fees as low as 0.5 sats.

Something’s definitely off with the network's dynamics lately.

Totally agree, I sent a TX and F2Pool didn’t mine it because it was under 1 sat/vB. My mistake, should've known better.

If they keep this up, they’ll end up with empty blocks or need to accept lower fee transactions.

Mining sections should be more active about this. These pools are just ignoring low-fee transactions because they can.

That’s a good point. If most miners start rejecting low-fee TXs, they might make a bit more in the long run.

But would they really? A lot of low fee transactions would probably disappear altogether if the minimum goes up.

Yeah, but I doubt many people are using BTC regularly for small transactions.

Exactly, we’re nowhere near the transaction volume needed to justify those fee increases.

Bitcoin's already pretty cheap compared to Ethereum and others. The fees aren't gonna get much lower.

Right now it's cheap at 1 sat/vB, but it might become more costly for certain uses like consolidation.

Chill out. I lost access to my email for this account, so I miss replies sometimes.

I think miners are purposefully keeping fees low to fill their blocks, even with all the spammy transactions.

I’ve seen estimates suggesting there's a ton of spam transactions, like a million every week.