Quote from: mocacinno on March 27, 2018, 08:33:07 AM

Quote from: MXgirl150 on March 27, 2018, 08:30:53 AM

I'm kind of new to crypto, but i have a question.

I know that mining cartels are a huge problem, so much so that regular people can't mine anymore.

I was wondering why can't they introduce some kind of limit of how much work one node can do per hour? Wouldn't that massively aid the problem?

I'm no programmer, so I'd really appreciate hearing thoughts about what solutions people are coming up with to solve this problem. Is it unsolvable??

~~Nobody~~ the network doesn't know how much work one miner or a pool of miners does...(obviously, the pool can make a more or less accurate estimation about the work done by it's members because they allow people to submit shares at a much lower difficulty to estimate their hashrate). This is information that isn't broadcasted to the network. Only when a miner finds a block whose sha256d hash of the header is under the current target, it is broadcasted.
Given a certain difficulty, the amount of hashrate a miner (or pool) has just determines the odds of him finding a valid block header.
The network's hashrate you see in (for example) bitcoin core's information is just an estimation based on the difficulty and the number of blocks found during the last 24? hours.

In other words: there is no way to limit the amount of work... A person with a single S9 can have a lucky streak and find 3 or 4 blocks in a year, while a person with 100 S9's can have a dry spell and doesn't find a block at all during a year...

Blocks can be broadcasted using different nodes, so if a pool wants to hide their identity, they can use a new coinbase address for every block, don't add identifying information to the blocks they're solving and use a new node for every block they broadcast. This way nobody will be able to tie a block to a pool, and nobody will be able to estimate the pool's hashrate.

EDIT: the text in green was added after i suddenly realised the OP was talking about pool mining, and the pool operators will have a rather good estimation about their user's hashrate... They just don't have to share this information with anybody else if they don't want to...

Thanks for the explanation. I won't lie I read it 4 times and its still complicated to me, but I was hoping for an explanation like this so I can start further research. Thank you