How a Signed Receipt Proves Your Work Was Counted, Explained Without the Math
You don't need to understand cryptography to understand the problem it solves here, so start with the problem.
When you point a miner at a pool, your hardware sends a stream of solved puzzles, called shares, to prove it's doing real work. The pool is supposed to count those shares and use them to calculate things like your share of a payout, or in a solo pool's case, whether one of them happened to solve an actual block. The trouble is you have no way to check any of that from your side. The dashboard says whatever the dashboard says. If it undercounts your work, or overcounts someone else's, you would likely never know.
What a signature actually does
A digital signature is a way to prove two things at once: that a specific piece of data came from...