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Can you differentiate the miners from the normal clients, by doing some frequency analysis on ip-addresses that announce new blocks? Or will the new block propagate so fast around the network by normal clients that it's impossible.
Can a miner remain anonymous?
Answers
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It is trivial for solo miners to use tor to hide IP adresses. This defeats mentioned above frequency analysis attack.
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I don't know what this frequency analysis technique would do, so this answer corresponds to the second question you asked:
Blockchain.info connects to hundreds of nodes:
The IP address Blockchain.info shows is the address of one of those nodes that they happened to be connected to which first saw that transaction. A node where privacy is desired does not allow incoming connections and only connects to trusted nodes that won't violate privacy expectations.
AFAIK there is no way to differentiate between block announcement and block announcement relay – thedrs – 2015-01-15T12:44:45.893
With frequency analysis I meant just counting for each node how many times it was one of the first to announce a new block. If there is 1 miner and 50 regular nodes, the miner will on average always be faster than nodes that are just relaying. But I guess as soon as the network grows it will be harder and harder, since you can't be connected to all of them at the same time. – Muis – 2012-07-24T20:07:31.607