Quote from: mikeywith on February 05, 2024, 11:08:20 PM

These individuals seem to be entrenched in the early era of Bitcoin mining. In today's world, Coinbase transactions hold little significance in such research. To simplify, the vast majority of mining pools allocate Coinbase transactions to their own addresses and subsequently distribute rewards from there. Moreover, many mining pools operate on a Pay-Per-Share (PPS) model, meaning they pay out rewards before actually receiving them (or sometimes after). This results in payments originating from a different set of coins than those visible in the coinbase transactions.

This is the only thing they have done right, they were tracking addresses that received payments from pools, not only coinbase distributions and monitoring the spending habit of them what opportunity they missed here was tracking the evolution of payments amounts, it would have been interesting data.

Quote from: mikeywith on February 05, 2024, 11:08:20 PM

Reading the paper further, I found another critical error in their approach which is linking the origin of exchanges to the location or nationality of miners. Their assumption, based on the use of a Chinese-owned exchange implying the miner is Chinese, or the use of a US or EU exchange indicating nationality, is flawed.

Exactly my thought, it works only if you split the world with some clearly defined boundaries.
So chinese miners will never use coinbase or bitstamp, us miners will never use binance, russian ones will never use one licensed in the us or europe and so on..
But, wtf you do with Canada? Grin

How can you say based on the exchange they use that this guy is Canadian and not from California, cause unless they use Quadriga...
What about the whole middle east and former USSR? Would a guy in Kazakhstan have different preferences from a guy in Turkey or UAE ?
And if that is not messy enough, what do we do with Bitdeer that has a megafarm in the US and uses OKex and many others like them?

It's an interesting approach but it's really flawed!

The only things we can be sure about it's the hashrate from companies that are listed on the stock exchange, there guys need to release that data, that thing is the only reliable thing we had, the rest...is like finding Satoshi!

Quote from: mullick on Today at 07:24:42 AM

Pools can be taken over by attackers and people have mental breakdowns. Seal team 6 could come in and hold slush hostage until he builds a side chain. There are endless possibilities your defenses dont account for. You are just being Naïve. Perhaps intentionally.

And at current hashrate we need to stop mining after a block for one and a half day writing for that pool to do two blocks. Cheesy

Quote from: mullick on Today at 07:24:42 AM

Arion Kurtaj is completely relevant example.

Except that web it comes to mining you have thousands of eyes watching those blocks and what their miners and the pools are doing, the moment farms keep mining blocks that are not broadcasted not validated you will have red light flashing everywhere! Also there is a huge difference between getting data from a server and reconfiguring it.
The ca$$h takeover of hashrate, that one I can believe it, the other not so much.