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On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Sam Huntress samhuntress@gmail.com wrote:
if people published their private wallet addresses then yes.
No. The entire point of public/private key pairs is that you can prove you own the pair without revealing the private key. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/58792/proof-of-address-ownership
sorry: i meant, everyone has a private wallet into which they're receiving bitcoin. the public key of that wallet is put into their management console web front-end.
We can use the bitcoin ledger (blockchain) to see what address every mining reward went to. This mining pool needs to prove they own one or more of those addresses in order to be trusted. They do this by privately signing some arbitrary challenge using the private key associated with the public key to which the mining reward was assigned. That public key (that we know from looking at the blockchain owns the BTC awarded through mining) is then used to confirm the signature thus confirming that the mining pool does indeed own that key pair and therefor did actually receive the BTC for mining that block.
ok so... does this assume that we can find out what the public key of people's "receive" wallets actually are? here's one (mine):
19trK4AVnCC1YHdJfgWWfpZ9c2uLociNjQ
so it should be possible to do a proof-of-concept... ahh... except i'm not planning to actually take any BTC out in the immediate future... ok i could transfer *something* out, like $10 or something.
getting hold of anyone else's public-key for their wallets means doing a *lot* of trawling of youtube and/or looking online for screenshots that people might have accidentally published via the various "hey this is real sign up under me" jobbie videos.
We can then look at the BTC<->USD exchange rates and see if the payouts from this mining pool are within reason.
i also found a page that shows how many "Founders" there are. a "Founder" is defined as "anyone who has at least a $3500 share in the three mining pools". there were around 14,000 such people as of arouuund.... november 1st.
it should be possible to make a guestimate of the total number of people in the network based on that, if we make some conservative guesses about the ratio of the number of people who did *not* by full shares vs those who bought partial shares.
it's quite a lot of assumptions.... it'd do for a start. y'know what... we could... um... just... ask them :)
l.