Thank you amincd for continuing to educate me!
As I understand, it can be determined who mined a block by the address used for the fee & reward payments,
The miner can use a different address for each reward payment so this won't allow others to link blocks created by a single party.
Please excuse me, as I am slow sometimes, but I don't think I understand. Are you confirming that no two consecutive blocks can be mined by the same address? If not, would you mind expanding on that statement so that I can better understand why not?
Are you also saying that multiple miner addresses can be used for 1 block? Is it different for rewards vs fees?
I very much appreciate your patience and knowledge and thank you so very much in advance!
Since he hasn't replied yet I will jump in. This is what I believe he was getting at...Just as a bitcoin user can have many addresses at which he can receive bitcoin transfers (speaking non-technically here), a miner could also have many addresses he can use to receive the block award (though I don't know how common this is). Because addresses are relatively cheap to create, a miner could easily specify a different 'reward address' for each block they generate. Because of that, there would be no way to know, simply from looking at the 'award address' value, that a particular block came from a particular miner (all the 'reward addresses' would be different). Some other method needs to be designed to indicate that a block came from a specific miner.