How do I reward a miner who made a block I like? Some decisions miners make are reflected in the blocks they solve.  Is it possible to send those miners some extra BTC without knowing who they are?  It seems obvious that you could just send some coin to the receiving address in the coinbase transaction, but usually, that address is for a large group of people.  Since the extra BTC is intended for only the one who made the decision, sending to the coinbase address doesn't work.

A friend of mine said something to me like this: When you're in a mining pool, if yours is the machine that finds the solution to a block, then you get a much larger reward than everyone else.  If this is true, then I would expect that the receiving address that gets the largest piece of a transaction that spends the total reward for a particular block is the address to which this "Thanks for mining the way you mine" reward would go.  Can anyone confirm that this is the case, or identify cases in which it isn't true?

I would very much like a tool people could use to thank miners for particular decisions.  I could write it myself or pay someone else to do it.  I'll promise right now to send one bitcoin to anyone who provides such a tool.
It seems obvious that you could just send some coin to the receiving address in the coinbase transaction, but usually, that address is for a large group of people.


For pools that payout via the generation transaction (cf. this one), it is not one address "for a large group of people," so you could not "send some coin to the receiving address" because there's not just one. (Generation transactions have no inputs by definition.)

Check with the particular pool (e.g., Eligius pool lists the winning miner in a column entitled "Contributor" here). Oftentimes they say who mined the block, and you can send them BTC directly.

Not all pools pay the miners via the generation transaction, but some do (Eligius and P2Pool were a few of the first to).


  When you're in a mining pool, if yours is the machine that finds the solution to a block, then you get a much larger reward than everyone else.


That's up to the rules of the particular mining pool. See this comparison of the different pools' reward strategies.