Do pooled miners directly participate in the Bitcoin network?

[airsheep]

Quick question ... do people mining as part of a pool directly participate in the Bitcoin network as peers, or do their mining apps just talk to the server running the pool? Or does it vary from pool to pool / app to app?

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[Bitcoinin]

No - pooled miners do not participate directly.  They are allowing the pool operator to handle the interactions with the network for them.

The one exception is P2Pool ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool )

[airsheep]

Thanks Bitcoinin.

[eleuthria]

To expand on Bitcoinin's response.  Miners on pools do not directly participate in the network in the form of selecting transactions to be confirmed in the next block outside of p2pool.  Some miners do function as peers, if they are running the Bitcoin client locally.  Being a peer on the network is simply running bitcoind or Bitcoin-qt (or certain other clients).  Mining is a separate function from the peer to peer relay of blocks and new transactions.

The main thing you lose out on as a pooled miner is you do not have a direct "vote".  You can't choose to prioritize a transaction or reject one (unless you are on GBT, but your vote requires you to join/leave the pool).  Another example is when BIP16 was announced, it required a majority of the network to mine blocks advertising support of P2SH by including '/P2SH/' in their block coinbase.  Since the pools are the ones that generated the coinbase portion that included /P2SH/, miners could not cast a direct vote, only join a pool that supported what they did unless the pool setup separate servers for miners to cast their vote.

With newer protocols such as Stratum and GBT, this ability to vote in the coinbase may be filtered back down to individual miners (even on pools) if the pool and software both support it.