do you understand why smaller blocks have a smaller chance …

OK well in general smaller blocks have a lower orphan chance. This is because other miners receive your block, process & validate it, & THEN switch to building on it if it looks good. Until they've decided somehow that it's definitely the consensus chaintip, such as validating it themselves & feeling sure it'll be built on, or actually seeing someone else build on it, they might just build on the previous block that they're sure of. As a miner you desperately want to get your blocks validated by other miners and built upon, so you need to make it as easy as possible. You could even be in a race with another miner who makes a block nearly the same time as you. Maybe you're a second earlier, but yours takes two seconds longer for other miners to validate, so you lose the rewards even though you got the hash first. That HURTS. Miners NEED those blocks.

Miners are both in competition & forced to cooperate. An example of how this plays out is the public spat that broke out a while back between Gorillapool & TAAL, b/c TAAL was orphaning Gorillapool's blocks. Gorillapool wanted to build big blocks, but SOMETIMES (this is all about percentages, margins) when they made a big block, TAAL would take so long trying to validate it that they'd mine their own block instead first, snagging all of the transactions & the reward. Ouch. Gorillapool was of course pissed that this is happening, especially since they're small & struggling, & since uh TAAL desperately needs other miners to compete with to be actually doing what they say they're doing. So they were like, stop orphaning our fucking blocks, dude. In the end they worked it out--- as they have a strong incentive to do.

All that said, the empty blocks miner is just being maliciously destructive. The Bitcoin Association just produced a compelling argument in this press release https://bitcoinassociation.net/statement-on-empty-block-miner/ where they present their data showing that they've been mining for a while & that they WERE accepting transactions before (presumably when they were trying to blend in as they increased their hashrate). That's pretty damning evidence that they're just fucking with us.

[[bsv empty miner]]