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Take a look at this transaction: https://etherscan.io/block/5305. The miner is listed as 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000. Is this reasonable? Did someone configure their node incorrectly? How can the miner address be zero?

It also happens on the following blocks: 5748 6011 6133 6320 6398 6424 6505 6515 6801 6818 6822 6845 6884 6935 6937 6968 6973 6985 6994 7022 7129 7158 7252 7485 7997 8506 8579 8618 8636 8648 8671 8701 8737 8847 8877 8976 8993 (These are the ones I found under block 10,000.)

Can anyone explain why this happens?

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If you look at the etherscan page of that address you will see there are several blocks mined by it and it also have uncle blocks too.

From the protocol definition any sequence of 20 bytes is perfectly valid address. From the Yellow paper definition of Block.

beneficiary The 160-bit address to which all fees collected from the successful mining of this block be transferred; formally Hc.

I'd say it is likely a miner with an incorrect configuration.

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  • With there be any reason for someone to do that on purpose?
    – Thomas Jay Rush
    Oct 15, 2018 at 18:16
  • For blocks that low, it was fairly cheap to mine a block. It was only a few dollars worth of reward per block, so nobody cared about using the correct address since they were probably just mining to help bootstrap the network.
    – natewelch_
    Oct 15, 2018 at 20:47

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