Quote from: xyzzy099 on October 31, 2013, 08:16:54 PM

Quote from: Augusto Croppo on October 31, 2013, 07:59:53 PM

Quote from: xyzzy099 on October 31, 2013, 06:43:37 PM

I don't get the distinction you are making here. It looks to me like he solved a block for the pool in exactly the same way he might have solved a block for himself if he had been solo mining.

When people participate in pools they are only providing the SHA-256 hash generated by their machines to let the pool find a block header with a number equal or lower than the current target. Therefore participants in a pool cannot "solve" a block because it is the pool who execute this process. What the pool participants only do is to provide the necessary requirements to complete this process, know as Proof of Work, which is just to generate a high rate of SHA-256 hash until the current target is found.

Solo "miners" can "solve" a block like pooled "mining" because their are not only generating the SHA-256 hash, but monitoring the block header of every block propagated in the Bitcoin network.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_mining

Quote

A share is awarded by the mining pool to the clients who present a valid proof of work of the same type as the proof of work that is used for creating blocks, but of lesser difficulty, so that it requires less time on average to generate.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work

Quote

Proofs of work that are tied to the data of each block are required for the blocks to be accepted. The difficulty of this work is adjusted so as to limit the rate at which new blocks can be generated by the network to one every 10 minutes. Due to the very low probability of successful generation, this makes it unpredictable which worker computer in the network will be able to generate the next block.

The pool provides you with a block header to work on. You double-hash the block header iteratively while incrementing the nonce, and return any results that are of higher difficulty than the pool difficulty to the pool. If one of those results happens to also be higher difficulty than the network difficulty, you have solved the block for the pool. The pool does not do any of the calculations associated with solving a block, so I don't see how you think the pool "solved" the block.

^^this