Are you located in China? Is the selfish miner located in China?
He claims to be named LiYi, and located in GuangZhou, China.
US counts should have jurisdiction in this matter. If the damages were done in the US and one party is located internationally then Federal courts have jurisdiction.
2 - Individual miners may not have standing to sue the selfish miner. In a civil case (involving money/damages) you must prove that damages be caused, but also that he damages were against you. There is clearly a relationship between the miners and the pool (the miners provide work for the pool and in exchange for each unit of work the pool provides a maximum amount of payment, if payment is less then the maximum then when the pool can afford to pay more then the maximum the units that got paid less get paid more). The relationship between miners at the pool are not as clear. I am not an attorney, but I think a likely ruling would be if a miner tried to sue another miner at the same pool, the judge would say that their "beef" is with the pool operator, not the selfish miner. On the other hand if the pool operator were to sue a miner the damages are more clear, as the miner did not provide the work, the miner said they provided the work, and the pool operator paid for the work that was not done. There is clearly a fraud here.
Pools don't pay miners for work, merely coordinate cooperation between miners who pay each other.
This is especially clear-cut on Eligius, where most of the funds never pass through the pool operator's hands.
That may be how it is on a logistics standpoint, but is that how it is in the eyes of the law? If you were BTC Guild or ghash I would say defiantly no, as both of those pools have block rewards (and tx fees) paid to the "pool" wallet, and the BTC is then eventually transferred to miners' wallets via automatic payouts. Eligius is very different in that it pays the block rewards (and tx fees) directly to miners via a TX in the found block. Someone could argue what you are saying but they could also argue that since the pool determines who gets paid how much via the payout cue (this being embedded into the header of work provided by the pool - I think this is how it works) that the pool does really control the found blocks. Even a attorney could likely not answer this question with certainty, as I don't think this kind of dispute has been litigated before. The only person who can answer would be the judge that hears the case (and any appellate panel of judges that hear any appeals).
I know for tax purposes, other pools are using this same interpretation.
For
tax purposes. But that interoperation is the same as if pools considered the block rewards as income (revenue) and the earning paid to miners (independent contractors for tax purposes) as expenses. It would be a wash. This is N/A for eligius but the pool fees would be income/revenue and the expenses (costs to rent servers, bandwidth, salaries if applicable) would be deducted from revenue to get the net profit to find what you owe in taxes.
Another argument is that the IRS has ruled bitcoin to be an "asset" but DPR aka Ross Ulbright has been charged with money laundering when dealing only in bitcoin. Just because something is considered one way for tax purposes does not mean that it is that way in "fact" and could be worked another way for "non-tax" purposes.
In theory he paid good money for this equipment.
Supposedly he made it all himself.
That means his primary cost is electricity (actual chips and PCBs do
not cost very much to produce).
Electricity can add up. Probably not in the millions but still not free. I would be interested to know how to build minors in a similar fashion but that is another conversation.
As far as I can tell he has done this to multiple pools. Do you think it would be possible to modify mining software so that only the stratum shares are sent back to the pool with the correct header, but the other shares could use a different header (one that pay out to another address)? Do you have a way to determine when he withheld a block from the pool? If so can you compare that to other blocks found around that time, is there any consistency as to who found the blocks? I know that it has previously been determined that you cannot modify block headers to make a found block payout to your own address as the hash would be invalid, but someone who has the resources to have millions of dollars worth of mining equipment might have the resources to make this happen.
It's not possible. I don't understand this part of your post entirely.
What is should happen when pool mining is the pool sends a block header (the header contains among other things where to send the block reward to) to the miner, the miner tries a random hash to check if the hash finds a valid block, and if so send the valid block to the pool, and if not then tell the pool they found one invalid (this may not be the correct terminology, but "invalid" meaning the miner did not find a block) hash. This is repeated until a valid block is found by the network. With GBT this is done with every single hash.
With stratum the same thing happens, only that only x% of "invalid" (see above explanation for "invalid" - did not find a block) hashes and every hash that does find a block. With every hash that the miner checks, it will use the same block header provided by the pool.
What my question was could someone, in theory, modify something so that only the x% of shares/hashes (the exact hashes that are sent to the pool) contain the header provided by the pool? For example, the software knows that hash1, hash 45, and hash 93 will be sent to the pool, only those three hashses will contain the header provided by the pool. The other hashes would contain some other header.
My question seems to have been answered by the fact that he spent much less on his equipment then his hashrate would indicate.
I am still interested to know what his motive would be in selfish mining. Even if he was not caught he would have a lower payout as the pool would find less blocks. This leads me to believe that he somehow reported that he had a higher hashrate then he really had.