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  • Quick question, what prevents a miner from creating duplicate accounts and submitting the same shares twice? For example, minerA computes a valid PoW solution to the difficulty target set by the pool. minerB somehow reads what minerA has submitted and resubmits the same shares without any actual work. I assume this is entirely dependent on the pool, but are there some standards to prevent this? Perhaps the PoW has some added hashes/values in the input script to differentiate a user? Maybe rejecting the same shares that are already submitted? Thanks :) Commented Oct 26, 2018 at 1:05
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    There aren't really standards for anything involved in mining pool operation. However, since shares are really just blocks with potentially invalid PoWs, each share is unique. Furthermore, because pools issue work to miners with specific parameters, they can use some unique identifier to be included in the share so that the miner can be identified. Many pools use part of the extranonce in the coinbase transaction to do this. So if two miners submit the same share, the person who is identified by the extranonce is the one who gets credited with the work, and he is only credited once. Commented Oct 26, 2018 at 1:23
  • Thanks @AndrewChow for answering. For clarity, the exact algorithm defers from one payout system to another but the overall idea is to look at the shares submitted and its frequency to "figure out" a miner's hash rate. That is, lower the hash values and higher the frequencies of the submitted shares more this is hash rate. Is that correct ? 2nd question, is there any other way of submitting a partial proof of work ? One could for eg submit a picture of electric meter, but it can't be verified in a decentralised manner. Are there any alternate decentralised ideas for partial proof of work ? Commented Nov 3, 2018 at 1:39
  • Actually, since the 2nd question seems a little off topic from the thread, i'll post it as a new question :) Commented Nov 4, 2018 at 7:57