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JamesWebb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Bitcoin's blockchain is a public ledger. Every block header, every nonce, every coinbase transaction, every timestamp is visible to anyone running a full node. Most people look at the price. The data itself tells a different story.

Starting at block 142,312 (approximately early 2011), a persistent anomaly appears in the chain: 37,393 blocks with no pool tag in the coinbase, spanning 14 years, appearing in 2,877 distinct burst episodes that cluster around moments when the mining pool coordination graph is restructuring. These are not scattered solo miners picking up scraps. They are a structured, continuous presence.

Every mining pool has a distinctive nonce distribution — the hardware, work distribution software, and stratum proxy configuration create a statistical fingerprint. KL divergence measures how different two distributions are. The anonymous miner scores 0.0003 against F2Pool. The next closest pool scores 0.01+. The coinbase data confirms it: same template, same extra-nonce encoding, same byte layout — with the pool identification tag stripped out. These are F2Pool blocks with the name removed.

Someone has had the comprehension to read Bitcoin's 587 miner-controlled bits per block header — reconstructing pool attribution, coordination patterns, and regime shifts in real time — for 14 years. Every number in the article is derivable from publicly available blockchain data. The data is there. Look at it.
https://subtracted.org/bitcoin-overseer [subtracted.org]

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