How (edit: not) to cheat the pools

[realnowhereman]

Note: this is a hypothetical, I'm not planning on doing this, I'm personally not that interested in mining.

There are multiple mining pools, right?

What would stop me running a custom miner that mines for multiple pools at the same time?  By the same time I don't mean running five different pool clients, I mean mining one hash and "selling" it to five pools.  I would get five times the payment for my effort then wouldn't I?

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[BitterTea]

What you suggest is not possible. The data you receive from each pool will be different, so the hash will be different. This is because one of the things hashed is the public key of the account that will receive the coinbase transaction.

[realnowhereman]

Fair enough.

So I guess the nonce is made up of a pool-assigned number + offset?

[Stefan Thomas]

Fair enough.

So I guess the nonce is made up of a pool-assigned number + offset?

Doesn't need to be, the block also contains the pool's Bitcoin address in the coinbase. That already makes the hashes pool-specific.

[xf2_org]

Fair enough.

So I guess the nonce is made up of a pool-assigned number + offset?

The 4-byte nonce is the only thing miners have total freedom to change*.  Everything else is assigned by the pool.

(*ntime may change within a limited range)