I'm not sure what you mean by "you" and "colluding".

If mining pools did this, it would be a service they provided for a fee. Do you say the grocery store colludes with you when they check you out at the register?

Everyone would be able to identify which transactions in the block sent all their inputs to transaction fees. Any given attacker may or may not be able to associate the input(s) used in those transactions with specific people.

The outputs of the generation transaction would be correspondingly larger. Whether or not any specific output could be associated with the inputs would depend on exactly how the output sizes were arranged.

I bet it's a lot more secure now after two critical OpenSSL bugs have been fixed.

I'll feel a lot better about it if Tor ever switches to LibreSSL for encryption.

I've been doing that with anyone who has an annoying signature (colors/size).

It's a lot easier to read threads, because it means reading 75%-90% fewer posts.

Pools require miners to submit shares, which are solutions that do not meet the difficulty criteria for the Bitcoin blockchain itself, but do meet some lower target established by the pool instead.

A miner might need to calculate billions of hashes (not sure what share difficulty looks like these days) before they find a valid share.

This means the pool operators only have to duplicate a tiny fraction of the work of the hashers.

How to properly market Bitcoin: http://themisescircle.org/blog/2014/02/12/im-hoarding-bitcoins-and-no-you-cant-have-any/

Is there an automatic way to flag pubkey hashes which appear "fake", as in we're very confident that nobody possesses a corresponding private key? (1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE)

Maybe some kind of entropy measurement?

The member has to submit each one to the pool in order to get credit for it.

Yes, that's what makes pooled mining work at all.

Miners* can't alter the generation transaction and still have their shares accepted.



(*) whether or not it's accurate to call people who operate mining equipment and sell their hashing power to a pool instead of create their own blocks "miners" is a topic for another discussion.

Network snooping will show the transaction coming from the exchange.

The exchange, of course, knows it was your transaction and they'll have records showing such.

The same people who engage in widespread network snooping probably can just ask the exchange to give them those records (or they'll hack into the exchange and just extract the records themselves).

That's why I said if you use a web wallet you don't have any privacy.

More like a worker at a diamond vapourizing the diamond instead of digging it out of the ground.

He still gets paid his wage (which is slightly diminished because the mine earned less) but the total harm caused to the mine is larger than the amount he gives up in income.

Long story short, they make the same mistake in that post they accuse everybody else of making - assuming the situation is static instead of dynamic.

Two things of interest happened recently. The least interesting one is that a pool got too big, again, and financial and social feedback was successful in changing their behaviour, just like every other time.

The more interesting thing is that is just became widely known just how little it costs it for a malicious miner to sabotage a mining pool via block withholding.

The Bitcoin mining ecosystem is now going to have to adjust to that that new knowledge, and the result might actually bring about the smaller pools everybody wants without any protocol changes at all.

Also this:

I won't get tired of posting this: http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/02/25/snowden-training-guide-for-gchq-nsa-agents-infiltrating-and-disrupting-alternative-media-online/

If you are running a Bitcoin node (this means Bitcoin-Qt, bitcoind, btcd, or I think Obelisk) on your own computer, and you are running a Tor client, then you can configure the Bitcoin node to only connect to the Bitcoin network via Tor.

If you're using an online wallet, then you don't have any privacy anyway so it doesn't really matter if you use Tor to access it or not.

If a situation arises where it's no longer safe to accept hashing power from random members, then pools would have to restrict themselves to only working with trusted participants. Presumably that would make pools a lot smaller, and there'd be more of them.

Tor communications are encrypted peer-to-peer.

Set up your node to accept connections via a hidden service, and use -onlynet=tor to make sure you only connect to other hidden services.

Now 100% of your peer-to-peer connections are encrypted.

Public keys in bitcoin are ephemeral. It's broken and wrong to reuse them.

Do I really have to bring up the distinction between correlation and causation?

This is try #2 for them.

Their only chance of getting it right for once is via the stopped clock effect.

Note that their first attempt was an even more blatant market manipulation scheme.

Joining cults isn't an issue of intelligence. It's more a reflection of emotional health vs injury.