[crispyporkbites]

I don’t think that works at all? Your buddy would have to mine that specific block to get the reward, which is based entirely on chance. You’d also have to spend as much on the POW electricity and hardware to have a chance of getting reward anyway.

[Aissen]

If you know you mine blocks regularly (e.g once per day or week), it's entirely doable. It's the miners who chose what transactions go into a block. In this scheme, the transaction is "secret", only one miner received it.

[goldenkey]

The transaction isn't secret after it gets mined in the block and added to everyone's main chain. The only use of this would be to conceal one's IP for the transaction broadcast but it's really not necessary anyway because the bitcoin mesh network does a repeating broadcast from all peers to all peers, of all transactions in the mempool. Just use a secure connection and only broadcast to a single peer that you can verify to be a standard "dumb client." Odds are they won't have any logging of IPs and will rebroadcast the transaction, which will propagate it to the entire network.

[dopidopHN]

Yeah unless your buddy is a mining pool, I don’t follow how that would work as well.

[Aissen]

Yup, for Bitcoin it would mean having the mining power of a big pool, indeed.

[Retric]

No, just a secret block that isn’t broadcast to everyone. 1 block a week is plenty to pull this off and that’s just 1/1,000th of the worlds mining power. Unless you get really unlucky and the block fails to enter the block chain letting someone else gets credit for the transaction.

[Aissen]

I'm curious what it's like, so here is a small calculation. Some metrics:

- 144 blocks per day are mined on average

- the current network hashrate is 145M TH/s

- a 100 TH/s rig is about $10k.

The investment to be able to have full control of mining one block on average, without electricity, internet and storage :

- per week: you'd need 143k TH/s (145M / (144 * 7)), so about $14M of investment in just the mining rig (provided you can buy it all)

- per month: you'd need 33k TH/s, so $3M of mining rig investment.

- per year: you'd need 2.7k TH/s, so about $270k in mining rig equipment.

Of course, there are a lot of variables here (e.g hashrate is highly variable), but this gives a general idea.

All this for a "washing" method that heavily implicates the miner: the address of the new coins is still known, it's not really "clean", just an unusual transaction.

[latchkey]

Now run the same numbers for ETH.

[Aissen]

No, I was just curious how big a mining pool one had to have to pull it off. I invite you to do the same for ETH if you're curious about it.

[Taek]

If you're really patient (and many big time criminals are), you only need to mine once every few months, maybe once a year or less. That's still hundreds of thousands of dollars of mining equipment, but well in reach for many.