Flash 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

Methodology

We define block with low transaction count as blocks with transactions less than 50 txns.
We define block with high transaction count as blocks with transactions more than 800 txns.
We look at various metrics in this analysis like number of miners per block type, number of blocks per block type.
Miner crossover on various block types.
Top 10 miners for high and low transaction count.

Miner Stats

There are 4940 miners who mine blocks with either high or low number of transactions.
There are 60 miners who mine blocks with either high and low number of transactions.
There are 4880 miners who mine blocks with only blocks with low number of transactions.
There is only 1 miner who mines blocks with only blocks with high number of transactions.
There are only 61 distinct miners that mine block with high number of transactions.
There are only 1.7K distinct miners that mine block with normal number of transactions.
There are only 4.9K distinct miners that mine block with low number of transactions.
The most common wallet crossover is the miners mining low vs normal blocks for a total of 1K miners.

Top 10 Miners by Number of Blocks and Block Type (High|Low)

Only 4 out of the 20 miners in the Top 10 are miners which mine blocks with both high and low transactions count.
There are a very few block with high number of transactions, therefore we see a lot less miners for the high blocks as compared to the low number of blocks.

Conclusion

Miners don’t specifically focus on the blocks with high number of transactions or blocks with low number of transactions.
We see miners mining all sorts of block types.
There is only one miner that mines the blocks with high number of transactions, which bolsters this evidence.

Block Metrics over Time [Number of Miners|Number of Blocks]

The data goes back 2016, and is very interesting to see that earlier there were only miners and blocks with very low transaction count being mined.
Only starting 2018 we say some normal blocks coming in and high number of blocks only start from Aug 2021 onwards.
If we look at the number of blocks over time, we see that the high transaction number of blocks are very few and far, majority of the blocks have 50-800 transactions and fall in the normal category.