How to differentiate between mining node and non mining node in bitcoin

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I am trying to understand how does mining traffic looks from non mining ones? If I try to discover mining node I believe I can look for nodes which broadcast blocks. Is there someway to know which Peer mined and broadcast the block ?

Thanks for help

nehamansha

Posted 2018-09-11T13:31:43.633

Reputation: 3

Answers

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Not really. When a node sends out a block, it doesn't indicate whether it mined the block itself, or whether it's relaying a block received from another node. The intention is that mining, like other aspects of Bitcoin, can be done anonymously, so the miner has plausible deniability.

If you have a large number of nodes on the network, then you could see which of them received the block first, and the peer who sent it is somewhat more likely to be the actual miner. Some block explorers do this and report that peer's IP address, marked something like "relayed by".

Nate Eldredge

Posted 2018-09-11T13:31:43.633

Reputation: 21 420

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Unless you have a connection to every single node on the Bitcoin network, it is impossible to distinguish between mining and non-mining nodes. Having a connection to all nodes means that you can see which node is the first to relay a block to you. However, this is not a guaranteed way to determine whether a node is mining. Due to network latencies and other block relay networks (e.g. FIBRE), you could still be relayed a block by someone who had not mined it.

Furthermore, nodes do not advertise that they are the one who mined it. This information is not stored in blocks nor is it announced by nodes that they are mining. Thus it is impossible to know which nodes are mining and which node created a block.

Andrew Chow

Posted 2018-09-11T13:31:43.633

Reputation: 40 910