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Comment by deepblueocean | Hacker News Reader

Imagine I have N resources, and instead of hopping between pools, I'm deciding what percent to allocate to ES-mining and what percent to allocate to "honest" mining. I could certainly allocate 99% of my resources to one or the other in each round, which would be a good (99%) simulation of fair-weather mining.

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Sure, the issue isn't so much the mechanics of jumping from one pool to another, it's just pools have a way of gauging exactly how much work you're doing for them.

You can't know ahead of time which pool to bet on, unless you know that the ES pool is ahead. There's nothing guaranteeing that pool miners are decentralized, in fact by design they would have to be centralized to keep completed blocks private.

If they were public they could be neutered by one rouge agent in the pool that immediately publishes completed blocks. So you have no way of knowing how far ahead an ES mining pool is. So on what grounds could you decide which pool to help?

It's not possible for the pool to hide what chain it is working on from its miners. If you're connected to the ES-pool when it is working on the mainline chain and you see it start working on top of a block that is not on the main chain, that's a good indicator that it is a block ahead of the main chain.

If you see it work on top of yet another block that is not published, it's probably two ahead, and so on.

You of course, can't just connect and immediately know, but if you watch the pool (as a miner) you can figure it out.

Ah. I see, your right, in that way you can know it's ahead, but can't spoil the advantage. Thanks for pointing that out.

So I was wrong.

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