In the bitcoin network, there are many different types of nodes. One of these types are miners and in the bitcoin network, is there any way to distinguish a miner node from a non-mining node? I'm asking because part of some research I'm doing, it would be great help to me if I knew which nodes were the mining nodes
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1 Answer
Yes, but only in a probabilistic way: If you run many different nodes and try not to leave any node in the network that isn't connected by any of your nodes, you'll be able to track and visualize the relaying of the new blocks. After a while, you'll have the whole network graph, looking at which might obviously show the miners.
By the way, using the same method, it's possible to find the authors of transactions, which is what Dandelion is aiming to solve.
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1"looking at which might obviously show the miners"-- might, but in practice often it doesn't. People have done this in the past in order to DOS attack competing miners, and I've found that connecting to fibre has apparently gotten me DOS attacked, because I was the first origin the attacker saw. Because I was closer to the attacker than other fibre connected nodes. Performing this deanonmization attack correctly probably requires nodes actually close to the miners, or compensating for the latency of each link. A lot can go wrong here. Any error risks tainting research based on it. Feb 3, 2019 at 21:49
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My node is listed as the “source IP” of many services transactions as a result of the way it routes transactions as well. These sort of heuristics absolutely suck and seems to result in far higher numbers of people in the SSH honeypot than normal.– ClarisFeb 3, 2019 at 22:19