ruialmeida

Google Analytics can do this by setting the last octet of IPv4 addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros.

Reference: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

From my understanding, halving will reduce the mining reward per block, which in turn can make it unprofitable for some miners, causing them to leave the network. Is the Bitcoin miner pool heterogeneous enough that centralization is not a risk?

Yes, thanks for clearing up the intercept part, I didn't remember how they did it exactly. They do make right decisions in my opinion to balance security/privacy issues at the cost of less ability to detect cheats. I think they also have a pretty good record of not banning inocent people.

In order for your game to render other players you have to know their position, so the game server has to send them to all players.

As an example, for CSGO in the past, the server always sent all player positions from anywhere, so it was possible to create cheats to draw players anywhere in the map. They changed the way it's done, coordinates are only sent when other players are nearly visible, although distant, or close by. This limited the way that wallhacks work, it's not possible to see where players are from far away :)

What needs to be done is reverse engineer the communication protocol. If encryption is made, some kind of key to decrypt has to be somewhere in your game client. Then you can convert 3D coordinates to 2D and even draw a radar on your smartphone if you make an app.

This will always be a cat and mouse game. There are some anti-cheat software more intrusive than others. Even Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) which is considered by many to not be very intrusive, used to intercept DNS queries to detect communication with paid cheats DRM.

Most anti-cheats also scan all processeses memory and even files to detect know cheat signatures. They tend to run with high privileges and some take in-game screenshots for analysis. Basically they have permissions to do anything and receive silent updates.

I wonder if statistical methods to detect cheaters result in too many false positives.

As a layman I sometimes use a block explorer to check how many confirmations a transaction I made has. I also check the median confirmation time and mean transaction fees out of curiosity if confirmations are taking too long but I let the BTC client choose the fee so I rarely have problems with confirmations on the network.