Can a miner just introduce a block full of valid predetermined transactions in the blockchain and get rewarded?

Question

My question is - let's say a miner has control over a certain number of bitcoin addresses. He creates a block containing small transactions to and fro from these accounts ahead of time in advance and also calculates the golden nonce for that block should it be introduced in the chain in the future.

Can he introduce this block in the chain at a particular instant of time and get the mining reward, considering that he can determine all the variables that would affect nonce calculation in advance. Also my understanding says that this block won't be rejected by other nodes as all the transactions will be valid with proper signatures(the miner controls all those bitcoins and will only try to spend them at that particular instant). What would prevent such a situation from happening? This way miners could make bitcoins for themselves out of thin air. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

This will not work, because a block's content includes the previous block's hash which means that a valid block can only be mined after the previous block is known.

The dummy transactions would not yield a reward to the miner, because the transaction fees are just going from the miner's left pocket to the miner's right pocket. The miner will only gain the newly minted coins, which they would have collected anyway, even with an empty block that included no transactions except for the coinbase transaction. In fact, the miner is suffering an opportunity cost, because they could have collected fees from other transactions instead.

Answer 2

What prevents this is the requirement to have the hash of the previous block's header in the new block header which is then put through Proof-of-Work. The hash of the previous block's header cannot be known until it is created, making it impossible to compute the work ahead of time. The miner cannot just pick any old block header to base his new block on as they will not produce the longest valid chain.

Answer 3

Something not mentioned in the other answers, and which your question implies you are unaware of, is that there is no requirement that one have any transactions at all. If you want to mine a block that consists of nothing except you getting the block reward, that is a perfectly valid block. This is something that has happened, although it was more common in the early days.

The reason it usually doesn't happen is that transactions generally have a transaction fee. This is where the person sending bitcoins includes in the transaction that the person who creates the block with the transaction in it gets a portion of the sent bitcoin. This isn't mandatory, but obviously it creates an incentive for people to include your transaction. If you were to create a block consisting only of transactions between your own wallets, then you wouldn't get any transaction fees (even if the transactions included fees, the fees would be paid from yourself to yourself, so no net benefit).

So what you're proposing would provide no benefit over just publishing an empty block (unless you wanted to make tracing bitcoin more complicated or something), and publishing an empty block is in turn worse than publishing a block with transactions that have transaction fees (unless you're trying to create a fork or something).

This way miners could make bitcoins for themselves out of thin air.

Yes ... that's what "mining" means. When someone mines a block, they get a block reward. Perhaps you mean "this way miners can get bitcoins without providing any benefit to the network". As I've explained, this is already possible with empty blocks (although I suppose one could argue that empty blocks still provide benefits to the network: for instance, by having more blocks after the blocks that do have transactions, those transactions are more secure).