Bitcoin is broken

Bitcoin Block #544000 contains exactly one transaction. This transaction is the coinbase transaction, whose only purpose is to give newly minted bitcoins to the miner. The mining pool receives 12.5 bitcoins while providing no value at all to the bitcoin users or the bitcoin network. Mining pools are in fact incentivized to not include any transactions in the block since hashing the merkle root wastes computational cycles. Scaled across a large mining pool, removing these extra cycles removes a non-trivial overhead.

This flaw in the design of Bitcoin (and probably most other public blockchains) will disappear once the block reward reaches zero since the transaction fees are also part of the reward for miners. Unless this is fixed soon we expect the whole network to basically stop functioning once every rational mining pool stops including transactions in the blocks.