Looking deeper into @boerst’s recent observation about invalid mining jobs by AntPool & friends to discuss his hypothesis about “selfish mining” and “glitchy template code”. I conclude that it’s probably a bug in AntPool’s coinbase creation code and agree with @boerst’s conclusion that this is another good data point for proxy pooling of “AntPool & friends”.| 0xB10C's Blog
Different mining pools sending out the same or a similar block template to miners is an indicator for proxy pooling. Knowing about proxy pools is important when discussing mining pool centralization. To find similarities between mining pool block templates, I compare the Merkle branches pools sent in the stratum jobs and calculate a similarity score. This shows pools with similar templates and allows building a relationship graph between the pools. --- In April 2024, I reported that pools lik...| Bitcoin Network Observations on 0xB10C's Blog