Hi all, new to mining. Sorry if this question is answered somewhere else but I saw conversations going back to 2014 and can't possibly read it all.
When solo mining with CK pool is there a way to verify which miner solved the block? What I'm trying to understand is if there is a way to verify if my miner finds a block. At this point (with limited understanding) I'm just point hash and CK pool and hoping they are trustworthy and will pay out if my miner gets lucky.

On a separate note is there a way to put a message in the found block? I see the last block (853742) from Solo CK pool and the coinbase tag and OP_RETURN data is full of gibberish. It would be cool if each solo miner could put their own notes in those fields (understandably this might mean more overhead for CK pool and if that's the reason why we can't that's totally fair).

Cheers!