Bitcoin Forum

How does someone ensure that a mining service is not skimming solved blocks off the top? Will a person's individual miner know that a block is solved by itself, or could the pool claim that one was unsolved while the owner keeps it for himself?

There's a certain level of trust between miners and pool operators.  Pool operators - at least the honest ones - are transparent with their operation.  For example, you'll see published generation addresses, coinbase signatures, etc.  That's not to say there aren't bad actors out there.  Scammers will get people mining on their pool, only to steal the block reward.  They don't last long, but the damage is done.

Most mining hardware interfaces will indeed show the highest share found, which is a good indicator of whether or not that gear found a block.  Also, most miners are very quick to point out any discrepancies.

So... is it possible?  Sure.  But those pools don't last long once people realize they're being ripped off.

This is true but unfortunately the most popular mining hardware, all the S* miners from bitmain, have broken forks of cgminer which incorrectly label found blocks and miscalculate the highest share.

Would it be possible to run it through a proxy machine that corrects that or records the blocks somehow? I am pretty new to mining but I have a R4 which I believe uses similar code to the S*.

Could someone point me to or explain the relationship between highest share found on a miner and the found block?

Current Difficulty is 336,899,932,796.  So when your miner's best share meets or exceeds this number then it will have found a block, provided that the mining software in your miner is calculating it correctly.

Which the majority of miners don't do correctly, since the majority of miners are made by Bitmain, and Bitmain ignore our fixes to their hack fork of cgminer.

ckproxy would tell you if you found a block.

will look it up, thanks