Is it possible to determine the geolocation of a bitcoin mining pool's stratum server address? For instance, Antpool has a server with the address stratum.antpool.com:3333. See: https://help.antpool.com/en/chapter-2/10.html Is it possible to determine where it is the way you can look up an IP address? Alternatively, is there data compiled for miners that reveals the locations of the various pools' servers?
1 Answer
There is nothing about a domain name or IP-address that is tied to a specific physical location. There are "geolocation" services that attempt to provide a location for an IP-address but these are of greatly variable accuracy and cannot be relied on.
Let's look at your antpool example.
$ dig stratum.antpool.com
; <<>> DiG 9.16.1-Ubuntu <<>> stratum.antpool.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 55752
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;stratum.antpool.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
stratum.antpool.com. 300 IN CNAME ss.svp.flkf.antpool.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
ss.svp.flkf.antpool.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. 300 IN CNAME 149bb53e5ee64aa0a30a7c9c89a8791c.pacloudflare.com.
149bb53e5ee64aa0a30a7c9c89a8791c.pacloudflare.com. 300 IN A 172.65.209.66
antpool is using cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN). This effectively hides antpool's real IP-address and therefore hinders the use of normal geolocation.
answered Aug 20, 2022 at 9:22
