It just comes down to how we define "insider" in this scenario. This was years ago now, but at the time at least this wasn't an automated mechanism. So yes, y

It just comes down to how we define "insider" in this scenario. This was years ago now, but at the time at least this wasn't an automated mechanism. So yes, you could follow the repository and pay very close attention, and if you're savvy enough maybe even automate that process to deploy the new miner whenever changes landed. (mine often broke by amdgpu opencl incompatibilities though, it often took some hacking to make the new algo work) But from where I was sitting it was very clear that the manual nature of it created tons of opportunity for the developers and those savvy and close enough to practically be in the same privileged set as developers. Whenever they changed the algorithm the network reset and the hash rate was a tiny fraction of its previous quiescent state, with a low difficulty, for days. I was paying semi close attention at the time, and even being purely manual with a single eGPU mining rig was able to somewhat capitalize on the opportunity created. Practically all my pittance of shares were mined in post-reset low difficulty periods. Those with actual large mining farms normally competing with the full rate difficulty surely were quite productive in those windows. There's no question that the switchovers would kill the hash rate, we can infer from that most the miners were being manually maintained by folks not closely monitoring the upstream repo for every change.