How do miners decide which transactions to include in blocks?

I'm curious about block construction with the new 0.1 sat/vb fees. Like, if a block is half filled with transactions at 2 sat/vb, do miners prioritize those over the next ones at 1.99 sat/vb and 1.98 sat/vb? What if the latter ones barely fill the block?

Yeah, empty blocks crop up for several reasons. Sometimes blocks hit fast and the memory pool is almost empty. Or some mining pools prefer to use a prebuilt header to get a head start. But there could be more reasons behind it.

I dunno, but I’ve heard -ck won’t accept anything below 1 sat/vb. Seems like that could lead to a lot of spam on the blockchain.

Miners are all about profit. They'll grab the 1.98 sat/vbyte transactions first and fill in with cheaper ones to max out their earnings. It's just some miners are slow to adapt to new rules.

I counted two big pools doing this: viabtc and mara. Surprised that trying to build a larger block could actually hurt your chances though.

Right, figuring out the best money-making strategy is tough. ck pool doesn't create many blocks since they’re mostly solo, so they have more freedom. Larger pools making tons of blocks have to be careful.

You made a good point, there’s a lot more to this. Many pools use algorithms like Branch n Bound or knapsack for transaction selection. Their goal is to snag the highest fees while sometimes dropping better offers.

Totally, it's tricky for big pools to decide. Plus, adding 0.1 or 0.2 and even up to 1 sat as minimum fees complicates it all. What if someone throws in some random ordinals?

It’s like using high-frequency trading tactics on a decentralized network. Going for volume and speed might rack up more rewards than waiting for each block to be perfect.

Not how it works, no one waits for the mempool to fill. Type 1 pools mine before they even fully download blocks. They could end up with empty blocks if they accidentally repeat transactions from the last block.