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I am doing research on Selfish Mining in Bitcoin. Here is the article http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ I wanted to know is there a way to identify minining pools? I wanted to know how can we know that when someone finds a proof of work is it done by an individual or a mining pool?
Thanks
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We can make an educated guess about it.
We can look at the hashrate that various pools advertise. We can look at what IP address the mined block was first seen at. We can look at the coinbase of the block. (Eligius.st famously embedded bible quotes.) We can also guess at the size of a mining pool by looking at its Alexa rank.
But we don't know for sure.
This page uses the advertised hashrates of the pools: https://blockchain.info/pools
