What's stoping people from cheating the mining pools?

[harik]

The cheat is pretty trivial - when you get a "share", before you turn it in, see if it matches the current difficulty.  If so, claim the 50BTC for yourself.  Otherwise, hand it in for the share.

Let suckers pay for your solo-mining.

I don't see anything in the protocols that would prevent this, and without extensive auditing of every work unit handed out I don't see how the pools could even detect it.

[BombaUcigasa]

You would need to know the exact transactions list that the pool selected, and also have the pool's wallet address as your own. Think you can do it?

[compro01]

wouldn't work.

the zeroth transaction of a block is the 50 BTC subsidy paid to an address you control.  in the hash work the pool is handing out, that address is controlled by the pool operator, not you.

and you can't just substitute in your address, as that would result in a completely different hash, which is unlikely to meet the target requirement.

[harik]

wouldn't work.

the zeroth transaction of a block is the 50 BTC subsidy paid to an address you control.  in the hash work the pool is handing out, that address is controlled by the pool operator, not you.

and you can't just substitute in your address, as that would result in a completely different hash, which is unlikely to meet the target requirement.

Yeah, I figured that out in my car in a "Duh!" moment.   You know the transactions, since they give you the data, but you don't know the private key for the first transaction.   Even if you do report it outside their system, they get the 50btc.

Oh well.  Back to the drawing board.   Lots of resilience to technical cheats, not so much social ones.

[stick_theman]

lulz @ Harik.

Let us know once you figured it out, mm'ok?  But, props to all mining pool operators out there though... That's quite a bit of work.