OK here is my full theory about the empty-block miner so ca…

OK here is my full theory about the empty-block miner so called attack. Let's call him the malicious miner. I believe this is a cyclical trend that we will witness until the subsidy becomes unsignificant but it can sort itself out even without honest miners orphaning the malicious one.

First of all, note that this can only happen because the fees/subsidy ratio is still low, and at the same time there is a lot of hashrate that can move from other chains.

Due to the empty-block miner having a lot of hash, the "honest" miners aren't willing to keep very high block sizes because it increases their orphan rates of the few blocks they do manage to mine.

So the block size will be reduced and probably not able to include all transactions anymore. It's a case of limited supply.

This will create a new fee dynamic that will push the fee per transaction upward. It's basic price discovery happening where each side between the suppliers and the consumers are trying to get the most from what they have to offer while lowering their risk.

So the users will have to raise the fees to increase their chance of getting included in the next block that will contain transactions (a bock not coming from the malicious miner).

Raising the fee per transaction will improve the price point, which will probably improve the profits of miners that do include transactions. We might see the fees/subsidy ratio of these blocks increase to new records. This will make the orphan risk of bigger blocks worth it again.

As honest miners earn more profits, these profits will get reinvested into accumulating more hashrate to decrease their orphan rate, which allows them to mine bigger blocks to collect more fees.

Because they can now mine bigger blocks, the fees can go down again and the cycle repeats until the subsidy is consistently unsignificant.