(just adding this thread to my watchlist)

I don't think so. Nobody really know who owns those addresses. And while mining standalone, anybody can watch your mining income, too, because once you spend some coins, they are connected together in the spending transactions.

If you care about anonymity, you can use pools over Tor as some people do.


Probably not, the rest on the account are payouts for people which don't cross their withdrawal limits.

it is, I see my wallet listed there

a) Somebody is accepting only transactions with fees (edit: most probable; there is currently only one more transaction with fees, which is 'sendmany' payout from the pool. Sendmany transactions are accepted only by newest clients, so older clients ignore this (their bad, they are missing my fees just because they use older bitcoin version .

or

b) Somebody started bitcoin client and found block pretty quick. Older transactions are not actively relayed to freshly connected node, so it's pretty normal that bitcoin client does not know all pending transactions.

Discovered via Bitcoin Monitor:

Block found at 2011-04-11 18:52:57
http://blockexplorer.com/a/2EnJ1VL8Kx

Bitcoin Charts reports the following trade on MtGox:
Apr 11, 2011, 18:53:44   |   0.75618   |   50.00   

Looks like some miner's got a bot to sell off block bounties.  This is the first time I've seen this particular pattern.

Block discovery bounties can be paid directly to multiple addresses?
http://blockexplorer.com/b/121668

Well, that's not absolutely correct. People _see_ block payments immediately, but also have to wait 120 blocks till it mature (or 100 blocks with hacked bitcoin client).

Oh, I get it - when the client generates the block, it includes the transaction for the generation bounty in the block, so that transaction can pay out to anyone, and this is valid so long as the total payout = 50 BTC (or whatever the bounty is at the time) + transaction fees.  Right?

Would it be possible for a miner to create extremely erratic payouts (i.e. distribute the bounty to a million addresses) as a vector of attack?  Or would the block be rejected in that particular case for being over 1MB?