How does a mining pool insure that the miner who will find the valid share for the current block will not use it for his solo mining?
1 Answer
The address the block reward goes to is in the data that is being hashed. That address is the pool's. If a miner finds a hash that meets the block difficulty, changing the address to the miner's own will cause a different hash, and you don't have control over the distribution of the bits in that second hash. So you don't get a block if you change the address.
Going the other way is the same: if the miner mines using his or her own address, that miner will not be able to send shares to the pool to secure part of next block the pool finds.
A miner can withhold the winning share though, which is detrimental to the pool, but cannot pocket the reward.
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what about holding the hash hostage with a zero-knowledge proof?– JBaczukCommented Sep 5, 2023 at 22:16