Many mining pools especially newly created “solo” pools are appearing lately.
A common scam consists of making miners believe they are mining in true solo mode, while the pool is actually proxying the hashrate to a large PPS/FPPS pool.
In such cases, the miner never receives real block templates generated by the pool.
This makes it essential to verify what pools actually send instead of blindly trusting them.
I developed BlockTemplate Inspector, a Python script that analyzes a Stratum V1
mining.notify message and displays the full structure of the job.
What the tool helps you verify:
- whether the pool truly generates its own block templates
- whether the coinbase contains the pool’s signature
- whether your solo address really appears in the coinbase, if it doesn’t, you are not solo mining
- whether extranonce and merkle branches update correctly
- whether the job corresponds to solo mining instead of a job forwarded from a large PPS/FPPS pool
Features:
- connects to any Stratum V1 pool
- automatically sends mining.subscribe and mining.authorize
- captures the first mining.notify
- detailed job display:
- job ID
- prevhash (LE/BE)
- version, nbits, ntime, clean_jobs
- coinbase1 and coinbase2
- extranonce1 and extranonce2 size
- merkle branches
- full coinbase reconstruction
- coinbase decoding
- no external dependencies (Python standard library only)
- does NOT mine and does NOT submit shares
Usage:
python3 blocktemplate_inspector.py
--host stratum+tcp://pool.example.com:3333
--user my_worker
--password x
GitHub repository:
https://github.com/Les-Chauffagistes/BlockTemplate-InspectorThis tool allows miners to verify what pools actually send and to detect hashrate redirection or proxy scams.
Feel free to send feedback!
