Bitcoin Mining Pool Identification

This Rust crate implements a new PoolIdentification trait on rust-bitcoin's bitcoin::Transaction and bitcoin::Block structs. This trait can be used for mining pool identification.

Methodology

There are generally two methods to identify mining pools based on the coinbase transaction in a block. Firstly, miners often put a human readable (ASCII or UTF-8) tag in the coinbase transaction. For example, a block mined by the Slush mining pool might have /slush/ placed in the coinbase input's script sig. Miners can be identified by mapping a tag found in the coinbase to the mining pool identity. Secondly, mining pools often reuse the address where the coinbase reward is paid to. These can be mapped to the pool identity too.

Both methods produce false negatives if a pool doesn't want to be identified. The coinbase tags are not authenticated. Pools can set a different coinbase tag (e.g. pool A mines his blocks with the coinbase tag of pool B). These would be picked up as false positives. It's however unlikely that a pool would pay the coinbase reward to an address he doesn't control, thus false positives are unlikely.

Implementation

The mapping of coinbase tags and mining pool addresses is based on data from 0xB10C/known-mining-pools which is a fork from btccom/Blockchain-Known-Pools which in turn is a fork from blockchain/Blockchain-Known-Pools. These projects provide a pools.json file mapping coinbase tags and pool addresses to pool identities.

The 0xB10C/known-mining-pools repository is included in this repository as a Git submodule. The pools.json file is used during the Rust build process to generate the code mapping coinbase tags and addresses to pool identities. The code generation can be found in build.rs.

Development

The 0xB10C/known-mining-pools submodule can be initialized and updated with the following commands.

git submodule init
git submodule update

To pull changes from 0xB10C/known-mining-pools's master you need to cd known-mining-pools and git pull them there. These must be commited. Make sure the tests run!

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.