Bitcoin Forum

I believe someone has already thought of this, as at one point I believe I saw a script in bfg miner that allowed this. The idea is that a miner collects money for shares from a pool but once a block is found, it collects the 25 (or whatever it may be as of reading this) BTC to a wallet instead of trading it for a share. My question is, if this has been implemented, why are pools finding blocks. Or is it that the code was removed and most have not thought of doing so. Or am I missing something, maybe this is not possible.

this

because you just hashing transaction string which has the 25 BTC reward address included

spot on.

all you can is not send result when you find solution to hurt pool - probably pay per share only. Maybe it is worth the risk of ban and loosing accumulated BTC only if you have pool service yourselves to hurt competetion

I have done some more reading and it looks like jerelimZ is right. A person could withhold a solution but that solution would not equal a block.

A pool won't give you shares for mining for yourself. You don't know in advance whether you're going to find a block, a share, or nothing at all.

Cryptography to the rescue! It's virtually impossible to cheat like this, because the receiving address is included in the hash, and hashes are (in theory) collision-resistant.

I can't think of many pools that deserve this with one exception, notroll.in. Still holding 1.6 of my LTC but its a waste of my resources and as such I doubt anyone else will bother either. Now on a paying PPS site you could do it to be a d!ck I guess....makes no sense for the average miner, though.

Withholding shares is a possible attack but regarding efficiency it seems about as useful as filling a blockchain with tiny transactions. Both problems are easy to solve and attackers would face increasing costs as the problem becomes more noticeable.