Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Eligius-miners: Do you agree with what is done with your hashing power?
by
doublec
on 08/01/2012, 03:03:25 UTC
Which doesn't provide any evidence he used his pool.
It can be shown that the Eligius pool is likely multiple block chains by looking at the coinbase of the generated bitcoin transactions. Here's a coinbase from an Eligius  bitcoin block that was used for namecoin only merge mining:

Code:
Block 160257
  coinbase: 07456c696769757302660c2c4d4d3d3d4976cbf9003c0705e29e581038d3ddbe260a5d324c2b17b24779b6ca48c4f8320100000000000000074f505f4556414c

The details of the coinbase are available in the merged mining specification. From this you can see that the number of entries in the aux merkle tree is 1. This means up to 1 other chain is being mined. That's probably namecoin. You can look up the hash of the namecoin block. It's hash 4976cbf9003c0705e29e581038d3ddbe260a5d324c2b17b24779b6ca48c4f832 or  block 36067.

Now look at a slightly later block. Say 160499:

Code:
Block 160499:
  coinbase 07456c6967697573025b252cfabe6d6dd28f2fe3e45981bb5ede1a627d762c620847f088cca62d45e6e91f3222ca48b60400000000000000074f505f4556414c

The aux merkle tree size is 4. So up to four other alt chains are being mined. Why the increase if it's only namecoin being mined? Also note that the hash in the coinbase no longer corresponds to a namecoin block. This is another sign multiple chains are being mined. This is during the period that i0coin and ixcoin hash rates increased.

Now a more recent block:

Code:
Block 161090:
  coinbase 07456c696769757302a6572cfabe6d6db1e2cb4f9537ecca37a59867856aba5c856992564a80918def0b965174d19a880800000000000000
The aux merkle tree size here is 8. Why the increase? Coiled Coin and Devcoin are both active at this time and would have required the aux merkle size to be upped. I got the Eligius found blocks from here.