Is this something that happens a lot? If you're a miner and this happens to you once every few years, that might be plausible, but if it's happening multiple times a year the IRS/FBI might get suspicious.

Could someone explain how this would work? I know the fees go to the miners...is there some way to determine in advance _which_ miner(s) receive the fee? I think this would need to be possible in order for this to be practical since I can't imagine a good outcome here for the person initiating this transaction to be that they just pay those fees to some random recipient(s), right?

If you publish your transaction publicly then any miner can get the fees from that transaction. If you send your transaction only to your preferred miner, then only your preferred miner can get the fees from that transaction.

None of the standard software used for mining enables adding additional possible transactions manually AFAIK. It theoretically could be done though.

The only thing you need is to be capable of actually mining a block, which costs about 13k USD I've heard.

Mining pools are run by teams of people whose full time jobs are to take care of their pool. I don't think any significant BTC or ETH pool runs standard software without any modifications.

I wanted to get a custom coinbase message included in a block, and paid $500 to a pool for the privilege.

>is there some way to determine in advance _which_ miner(s) receive the fee?

yeah, don't broadcast the transaction publicly. Only give it to the miner you're colluding with.

Yes. You only broadcast the tx to the miner; who keeps it to themselves.

I am not expert in blockchain but how can you wash money with transaction fees, you can't know where the fee are going, right ?

I don't know the specifics of etherum, I actually do think they are somewhat robust against the more trivial attacks.

However, in some blockchains it is absolutely feasible to become a majority miner for a short period of time by simply renting cloud resources.

If the network is further temporarily reduced due to internet connectivity flapping/segmentation, it might be cheap.

1) Situate yourself in a country with poor connectivity. 2) Trip a breaker to zap most of the connectivity 3) Spin up a gazillion cloud instances 4) Compete more-or-less only with national miners.

The fee goes to the miner of the block with the transaction in it, the "next block" in a simplified sense.

If you've already mined the next block yourself, you can publish the transaction directly in the block itself instead of loose out to the network like a pleb. Then you'll be effectively guaranteed to get the transaction fee yourself.

Can we see if this particular transaction was broadcast to the network?

You can if the miner is doing the laundering

How would you know which miner would get the fee?

By only giving the transaction to one specific miner.

How is that even possible? You can't know who will mine the next block.

It seems possible, although challenging; I'm curious for your take on this:

0. You run a large network with substantial hash power.

1. You submit a transaction that is broadcast only to your own mempool and don't relay it outside of your network.

2. You attempt to include this output in some/most/all attempts.

3. You finally solve a block with this transaction and distribute it to the rest of the network.

If this were happening, one way to surveil for it would be to keep track of every submitted transaction that a few nodes ever see. Is there a mining pool that is consistently mining huge fee transactions that were never present in your mempool?

If you've already mined the next block, then you know what the next block will be.

why not? Miners are looking for transactions to verify. If you have the money, and if you craft your transaction so that miners put you first in the queue, you will be quarantined to be in the verified chain.

In theory could this be done by DoSing people while mining?

There are better ways to launder money than to post egregious transactions on a public ledger for all the world to see.

im not sure why this is being downvoted. this is clearly the case here.

the user and the miner are colluding (or the same party). the user does not broadcast their tx publicly, only sending it to the colluding miner. since fees have no utxo history, this essentially launders the eth

That was my first thought.

“Where did this money come from? I made it trading cryptocurrency and paid taxes on it.”

One critical problem: The blockchain irrevocably records the recipient of the transaction fee.