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I followed the instructions in this answer to get a private testnet.

When I start mining in dev/private network using miner.start() what exactly is being mined?

Since I am the only node in the test network and I am not sending any transaction, I don't understand what the newly mined blocks contain!

Is the network supposed to mine a block every x seconds even if there is no transaction in the network?

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    In answer to your final question: yes :-) – Richard Horrocks May 9 '17 at 10:31
  • why is it so? Isn't it wasteful to add blocks having the same state as the previous one? Wouldn't it increase the size of the blockchain needlessly? – pd176 May 9 '17 at 11:04
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    Adding new blocks to the chain increases the security of any previous blocks that contain transactions, as it makes it economically more difficult to change older blocks by creating a new version of the chain. In your case you have no blocks that contain any transactions, but the code has no intelligence to know this. – Richard Horrocks May 9 '17 at 11:07
  • okay makes sense! But won't the merkle roots of 2 blocks be same if there is no state change across them? – pd176 May 9 '17 at 11:20
  • I suppose the root of the state trie will be the same, but other things will be different in the block header. (Or have I missed your point?) – Richard Horrocks May 9 '17 at 11:24