Maybe a stupid question, but could this not be used to determine which cloud mining operations were legit? A lot of the cloud mining operation threads have accusations of being pyramid schemes. Something like this could allow a company to prove that they solved a block(s), and thus assure potential customers that they were legit? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but it appears to be a tool that could become standard for legit companies.
I suppose it can help. But realize that there is no way to absolutely determine the miner of a block. (See our discussion:
http://whomined.com/#how-it-works)
I think the unique thing we do is make the clues we use to determine the miner public. So everyone can easily see the receiving BTC address, the coinbase in which some mining pools "sign" their block.
The receiving BTC address of the first transaction in the block is probably the strongest clue. I can't imagine anyone having incentive to fake it.
Side note:
We can probably get even better by scrubbing more of the mining pool website for their self-reporting (we only do some of them now), but it's a lot of work because each one needs an individual script to parse it, and their websites sometimes change rendering our scripts useless. We don't have time to do this. Right now, we're trying to get our games to cover the hosting costs -- and we're still a long way off. :-)
