Topic: How do I buy a block to my address ? (Read 3345 times)

Well you never physically see the machines, so I assume why not?

Unless you break it down to where cloud mining, they "normally" pay you over time after you invest.

But with rented hash you normally get to choose where your hash goes.

Can hash renting services be termed as cloud mining ?

Congratulations on being lucky. Works in favor of the cloud mining site in the long run though, which apparently is really hard to understand for some people.

We had a solo group renting hash with phil, we got two blocks after a couple of attempts, was like attempt 3 or four. i think we got a tiny bit more than when we started.

Simple statistics ... only the rental company charging a % fee is expected to make money out of it.

Block finding is random, so of course some win and some lose, but it will average out to only the rental company making a profit.

Oddly enough, that is blatantly obvious, but it doesn't seem to stop people renting ... ... ...

Has anyone ever made a profit by renting from westhash and mining at solo.ckpool or only the miners at westhash make the money?

For 0.5BTC per block in addition to my usual fee of 0.125 I could set up a private node for you to mine to with whatever signature you want, but you'd have to find the hashrate to mine at it with, so renting from MRR or westhash etc. It also won't tag it as "your block" on blockchain.info or blocktrail.com so you'd have to find a way to tell them it is your block using their API

Probably the easiest way to do it, as I don't think many if any pool operators (me included) would do it sorry.

Run your own node, and sign the coinbase to what you want. Only downside is how much you will have to spend on renting hash to get a block.

I'd say just rent out 5PH from westhash and mine against your own node.

LoLz. True. It is like people believe they own a lot of asset till they are charged under civil asset forfeiture.

I don't get it. Why would a China pool need that info? Why would they care who is paying them 25+ bitcoins in order to have their name on a mined block in the blockchain? Not everyone lives in USA!

Also how is that different than normal mining where people pay with their hashrate? Here the guy is paying with bitcoins.


Pay the blockchain web site 0.5 BTC to help you with that then


True, but for him it does. Why ruin his wet dream?


People have too many BTC.

Paying 0.5 BTC to write his name on blockchain and no one is taking up this offer? Well, I'll take it.

@OP Just let me know if you are OK with a non-bitcoin blockchain?

Other than I wouldn't do it anyway, you also missed the point of the issue of his post.

To actually have your name on "a" blockchain web site is not exactly the same thing as mining a block.
It means 2 things:
1) You find blocks and have some unique identifier in them
2) "a" blockchain web site allows you to identify those blocks as "yours"

So to do that, the miner would have to identify blocks differently to how they normally do.
Then "a" blockchain web site would have to allow a change to add the extra identification for those blocks.
This 2nd point I doubt "a" blockchain web site would do for one block.

The block contents, and the string shown on "a" blockchain web site, are not the same thing.
It's a translation.

It also does NOT mean that someone "owns" a block.

For my pool it actually has my "name" in it and on most blockchain web sites.
I think I'm the only one also so far

Just make sure you collect a ton of information on who he is *exactly*, including tax identification, because otherwise you've just been an accomplice in money laundering.  And good luck defending yourself on that, when somebody paid you money just so you could give them a lesser amount of different money back.

Why not if he is ready to pay for this? Charge him 26-27-28-whatever and provide him what he wants. Or you don't want his coins?

We sold a few blocks in our early ages. The service is no longer available as the latest pool software upgrade had the mining address hardcoded to increase efficiency.

[2013-06-08] Block 240451, sold for 27 BTC, coinbase “Block of Kuroneko Minted by oCaUQ”
[2013-06-10] Block 240800, sold for 27 BTC, coinbase “五更瑠璃 御坂美琴 逢坂大河 小鳥遊六花 千反田える”
[2013-09-18] Block 258692, 258712, 258742 was mined to 1LoveYoURwCeQu6dURqTQ7hrhYXDA4eJyn, coinbase “To my honey, by bitfish”
[2013-12-15] Block 275052 was mined to 1sfminER57n9d5jUa6a915SJZ8SgHieWg, coinbase “Each 1mBTC in this block represents one of the 25000 shares issued by sfminer.com”
[2014-05-08] Block 299665, 299666 was mined to 1LoveYoURwCeQu6dURqTQ7hrhYXDA4eJyn, coinbase “执子之手，与子偕老。神鱼 to 冬冬”

I would be pretty surprised if any of the pools would mess around with this even if you paid multiple BTC over the regular block fee.   I think you would have to pay much more then you are thinking how you were talking about .5 BTC.

If you are serious and make your own pool, and rent hash it could be done.  But again it is pricey and not guaranteed.

Ahh!  Now we know what you meant .

All of the block explorers determine the "block owner" as you call it through a series of checks against known parameters.  For example, the coinbase signature might have some string in it identifying the pool (like I showed in my earlier post).  Another way to check is by the BTC address in the coinbase transaction.  You can find a JSON file that blockchain.info uses here on github: https://github.com/blockchain/Blockchain-Known-Pools/blob/master/pools.json

The thing that really needs to be pointed out here is that there is no "owner" concept as you are implying.  AntPool doesn't own block 374990.  It just happens that a miner connected to AntPool happened to find a share that satisfied the network difficulty and the transaction set he solved was added as the newest block on the chain.  As part of the block creation, the generation transaction (the one that describes how to distribute the current block reward) has instead of a typical "scriptsig" a "coinbase".  In there you can pretty much put whatever you want - which is what pools sometimes do to identify themselves.  So, in the case of block 374990, the coinbase transaction puts the following:

Using a hex decoder, you end up with this:

So... finally what this means to you.  If you want the block explorers to recognize "Pool Murdoch" you must provide them some way to identify blocks found by you.  Then, they have to agree to add your pool to whatever algorithms they use to figure out who mined the block (for blockchain.info, it's that pools.json file I linked to earlier).  Then, you just need to find a block .

Wont happen.

(and using a stupid username wont help either)

For that, you'd have to contact the site in question - e.g. blockchain.info / blocktrail.com / blockr.io - and get them to add your address and/or coinbase scriptSig (see previous post) specifically.  Most of them only really deal with recurring addresses, coinbase scriptSigs or other such information, rather than adding that information for every single individual miner that might find a block once in a blue moon.

If you open blockchain.info now, you'll find something like this...

374990 - AntPool
374989 - KnCMiner
374988 - F2Pool

This is what I mean by owning a block. For the block I'll buy/find, my name will be written instead of AntPool, KnCMiner or F2Pool.

Block explorers would show them as solo.ckpool based on the coinbase output addresses and/or the coinbase scriptSig.

Example:
Block 374057: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/000000000000000000490453ff4e5920efd93c78e5260c899837f50660d8326d
Coinbase transaction: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/639897c64407472136a3fea7980dfe1d9b489c66f290436ae4b662ea7482c712

Output 1, the solo miner: 1bziSGvR4a8ogVbR4JNG5D7pFAZFgpADX (25.20362442)
Output 2, solo.ckpool's fee: 1PKN98VN2z5gwSGZvGKS2bj8aADZBkyhkZ (0.12665137)

decoded scriptSig: )µ¬æòUhÌlÙŽq¨Ö˜ ckpool!BIP100/BV2000000/solo.ckpool.org/

If you point the rented hash at ck.'s pool, if you happen to be the lucky block finder, the coinbase signature will indeed state the block was found by ck.'s pool:

I know that when he first started the solo pool thing, he spun up some instances for private entities.  Not sure if he's still willing to do so, or if he'd be willing to alter the coinbase sig to mention Pool Murdoch (or whatever you want).  You'd have to get it straight from his mouth (or keyboard as the case may be ).

It should show the pool's name. Some pools distribute the payment directly to addresses (ex. Eligius, link is a block payout https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000c5687e998a7c042d21504f4d296038e63041132e8545fba
and https://blockchain.info/tx/3457eee8446ab9aa4dbf173388a480480798d9521e364ea42f4837720769d7e4 for the specific payout transaction).

Once again I'm not sure what you mean by "owning" a block as it makes no sense.

This seems to be a nice idea. Block explorers will show whom as the owner of blocks found this way? Pool Murdoch or solo.ckpool?

Not really. We can easily use third party escrow websites like LocalBitcoins.com, 100bit.co.in or PaxFul.com.

Yeah, I did say shared.


If somebody wanted perfectly clean coins without association (and yes, this would also mean dropping custom scriptSigs), then that wouldn't do.

The coinbase transaction still goes directly to the address.
A mined coinbase can go to 1 or many addresses - it's still the same.

Because those solo pools' blocks are shared;

That's why he'd probably have to actually solo mine against his own node.  Unless he wanted to pay a pool operator BTC26 up front, trusting them completely (in lieu of an escrow service), and wait around until that pool finds the block with it paid out in full to his address of choice.

As it is, there's only a few services where you can buy 'clean' coins; Hedgy's MBP contract and BlockTrail Mint, for example, but they're still intermediaries (e.g. BlockTrail's is Miner -> Mint -> You)

He could put that amount in escrow or send it first.

Nah, he just thinks we're that daft that we'd give him free money. See Kano's post above this which is spot on.

What do you mean "why not?" Are you truly that daft?  Here's an idea: if you want 25 newly minted coins, and you're willing to pay a premium, why not just spend the coin renting enough hash power from somewhere like nicehash or MRR and point that power to ck.'s solo pool?  Spend enough coin and you'll eventually find a block that is all yours.

Right .....

So what you means is?

Unfortunately for you, in the BTC world no one who can find a block is silly enough to consider that.

Sure, but I don't get what you mean by "owning" a block.
The only logical reason to do what you want is to get clean coins.
Pools will have trouble explaining/setting up your payment.

Why not ? I'm ready to pay a premium for that. Say, the pool gets 25.5 BTC for a block. If they mine it to my given address, I'll give them 26 BTC. So, they can always distribute the share to their miners and keep a nice profit on top.

I think he wants bitcoins without any transaction history, newly generated coins that can't be tracked from where he got them

What do you mean "own a block"?  I'm assuming you want to throw some message into the coinbase signature to tell the world that this block is yours?  I swear one of the Chinese pools lets you bid on whats in the coinbase signature...

EDIT: I re-read your ask from the OP.  Yeah... good luck with that.  No pool is going to change their payout address to be yours.  The best you could hope for is what I wrote - the pool altering their coinbase signature for a block.

Just wish to own a block. Nothing special. I just dont wanna go through all the cumbersome setup process. Obviously, if the demand is unreasonable, I wont be buying it.

yeah this is a little confusing, why would you give out more than the reward?

I suppose that would work. But why would you want to do that?

Why not ? I'm ready to buy it for a premium. Say, the pool gets 25.5 BTC for a block. If they mine it to my given address, I'll give them 26 BTC. So, they can always distribute the share to their miners and keep a nice profit on top.

The only way you could do that is if you solo mine. No pool or service would want to just give you 25 BTC for solving the block, they want to distribute the Bitcoin.

I don't know of any mining ops that let you do this, currently.

You would have to solo mine against your own node, most likely.  Here's a guide I have used before: https://www.bcoinnews.com/tutorials/solo-bitcoin-mine-cgminer/

Other solo mining solutions - e.g. bitsolo or solo.ckpool - have the reward split between you and the pool operator(s).  If that's okay, then check out solutions like that.  Saves you from having to run a full node on your own machine(s) / having to spin one up as an instance at a VPS.

I want to mine a block to a given address, i.e. the coinbase Tx should be made at the address I'd provide. Is there any service available that is offering this service ? If yes, at what cost ?