OP, while it's me who suggested the other firmware, I can vouch for thierry4wd's firmware, he is an established member and a talented developer, you should certainly try his firmware since it's free of charge.

thierry4wd, sorry I usually forget to suggest your firmware.

I have to agree with wndsnb's statement, this is what I meant by the "imperfections" of your test, the fee on Asic.to is 2.8% so 4.84%-2.8% is just 2%, this variance will most likely happen on all miners regardless of the firmware they use, of course, I am not defending anyone here nor I am associated with any custom firmware devs.



Why wouldn't you mention it? I believe if you have the evidence (which I am sure you do since you are a developer yourself) it's probably a moral responsibility to let the users know.

Which pool is asking you to enter your own difficulty figures? it's 2021 already and all reasonable pools will do that for you, as a miner owner all you need to worry about is entering the correct URL, username, and password if the pool expects you to put more effort you should probably find a different pool.

Some pools, however, have a special port for hash power rentals from the likes of Nicehash, those will have the higher difficulty set to them, since you have your own gears just use the default port.

It's pretty normal to have more discarded shares than accepted, you are probably worried about it because you don't understand what discarded shares mean, you can find plenty of explanation on google or this forum, no firmware will "fix" that for you because it isn't a problem in the first place, unless it shows the wrong status on purpose for some marketing purpose.

But just to answer your question, all S9 firmware versions are "removable" with an Sdcard, but if don't want to go through that process, avoid every firmware that has the word "Secured / Security" in the description, so basically all the 2019+ firmware versions.

You can download it here > https://www.awesomeminer.com/antminerfirmware , if your miner runs the latest firmware or any firmware from Dec 2019 onward you might need to flash it using a Sdcard loaded with the recovery files found on Bitmain's official website, if you face any issues let me know.

This is a very serious claim given how widely the firmware is used (vnish in general), could there be some imperfection in your testing? I have personally tested about 150 miners with Vnish and the fees were within range, of course, things could have changed in later versions, mind if we take this discussion to the original topic and see what Marc has to say to this?

According to this article TMSC plans to throw in 100B to increase its chip-making capacity over the coming 3 years



It also mentioned


I couldn't find out what a 100B means in terms of their current capacity, it could be a lot or nothing to really consider, this will indeed have a direct impact on mining equipment if Bitmain can buy more and probably cheaper chips - gear prices will drop in the near future when bitcoin price is ignored.

What does everyone here think about this?

Why so? consuming energy could be a net positive for the economy, generating energy is about extracting value from things that wouldn't be utilized otherwise, I am not a U.S citizen but from what I remember the U.S government usually leans towards making life more difficult for the average joe and easier for the money-making businesses, lower taxes on mining operations will result in more mining, more jobs and eventually higher taxes from the electric companies and every other firm involved in the "making" of that energy, and the end result is more money to bail out wall street when the shit hits the fan.

Of course, this ignores Ozone depletion and global warming altogether, I honestly not even sure any government really cares about that anyway.

There is nothing good about this, this whole thing is a joke at best.

1- Miners that already run on "green" power don't need the likes of Argo
2- Mining is a highly competitive game and the initial set-up cost + power cost are "the be-all and end-all" of a successful mining operation


Miners mine for a profit and nothing else, they follow the cheapest source of power, a great example is how things are in China, during the rainy season they move to Sichuan to mine for cheap, once the rain stops they move back to "the most polluting source of energy" which is coal.

Almost every form of clean energy is seasonal, it's there for a few months, and then it's gone, or it's there in the daytime and go at night, storing that power adds an extremely expensive cost to operate and makes it unprofitable, it's close to impossible to profitably mine bitcoin or run any other business with pure clean energy.

This whole green energy thing is nothing but a media pitch.

As mentioned above you need firmware that ignores the voltage/frequency written into hash boards, but keep in mind that most custom firmware out there are either scam or charge higher fees than advertised, stick to Vnish (AwesomeMiner/Asic.to) or BraiinOs.

Did you buy it used? I think I remember someone saying the frequency and voltage settings are probably stored in the EPROM of each hash board, so there is a chance that this board was taken from a different miner, I don't think this causes any issues, the reboot probably comes from something else, but if you want to fix it you could use the fixed frequency firmware version if that does not work you might need a custom firmware.

Why do you use BFGMiner anyways?

Phill gave an excellent explanation of what is happening right now, but the long-term causes are plenty, the most important and most ignored fact is that price drop does not lead to negative mining returns.

People have this narrative that all miners are mining at close to break-even which isn't the case, when price drops, all miners earn less, but the majority don't go into a loss zone right away, and of course, miners would settle for less profit.

Those who go into the negative territory will stop mining but their gears won't disappear, they will change hands and that's all about it, this is one of the reasons why the difficulty chart isn't moving in a vertical line and it does pause, correct and continue up.

One would say, but will some gears die and thus won't be reallocated, while that's true, many gears don't die for good and they are fixed, so just like the above, they disappear for a while and come back online in a different shape or/and a different location, also since most gears that die for good are usually pretty old, and thus their hashrate is low which makes their disappearance hard to notice if 10,000 *S7s die today, who cares?

The second factor would be the efficiency improvement, if the technology reached its peak and nobody can make more efficient / cheaper gears than what we have now, eventually we will get to the point where price drop will really affect difficulty, but until then - it's not going to happen.

What people should understand is that many, many people have free or super cheap aka almost free power (my self included), I will never ever turn off a mining gear because it isn't profitable, why? because it can not be "NOT" profitable, it either dies on me or I would sell it, the latter, of course, will fall under the reallocation group which only affects the difficulty for a few days or weeks.

And then you have those people who mine for a loss,  yes there are a bunch of people who mine for a loss, some do it thinking price will go up in the future ( you can argue that they should directly buy bitcoin rather than doing that but they have all different reasons not to agree to that logic), there are also people who mine to launder their money or to own bitcoin without having to use their credit card because it's illegal/expensive, and of course, some people want "fresh" bitcoins.

I can write another hundred lines of reasons why difficulty goes up while the price goes down, but I think I have mentioned the ones I think are most important.

Now that is the reason why the price goes down while difficulty does not, the other scenario of why the price goes up and difficulty doesn't keep up, it's simply because money moves faster than mining gears by a few orders of magnitude, a rich guy like Elon can tweet something positive about bitcoin or drops a couple of billions into bitcoin and price goes up 10% in a day, 10% of the total hashrate right now is 16EH, that's the equivalent of 145,454 S19 pros,  that number of gears is impossible to manufacture in a day, even a week or perhaps a month, even if Bitmain had an unlimited supply of money they will be bottle-necked by something else.

This is pretty strange, all your 9 chains seem to find 18 Asics and they should work perfectly


You have an issue with chains 2,9 and 10, the strange thing is that they are on different hash boards, you might be able to revive these chains with custom firmware using different voltage/frequency settings.

It's usually 5 and 4


OP has a problem with fan 5 which is usually the exhaust fan by default but should be tracked easily to know which fan is bad.

Ebay is probably one of the safest places to obtain mining gears, but you pay for the "safety", finding gears in other places would be a lot cheaper, and of course, you pay for it with a chunk of risk, while the majority of miners resllers are scammers, legit sellers are there, one should spend a bit of time trying to source a legit seller rather than paying 30-40% extra just for safe trade.

OP, if you don't mind telling me where are you located, I might be able to recommend trusted sellers in your area/country.

Yes you can, the problem with the stock firmware is that it only feeds the board for a short while ( a few seconds), and then it stops when it doesn't find all 63 Asics, there was a diagnostic firmware floating around back in 2018 which I can't seem to find now, that firmware had a "test" mode in it which keeps feeding the chips so you can measure the voltage, so you are going to need that firmware.

I also think using custom firmware like Vnish (Asic.to / Awesomeminer) and then using the auto-tune function will give you a lot more time to measure the voltage, so you can try that as well, keep in mind that every domain has its normal voltage readings, make sure you check the manual posted above for more details.

You are probably not doing anything wrong, this is a very common problem with all Bitmain 17 series gears, these boards break really easily and it's hard to fix them, if your supplier really fixed it then they probably didn't solder/glue the heatsink well and it lost contact again, of course, this assumes he is honest in the first place.

There isn't something you can do about it unless you are familiar with electronics and have the tools needed, ask him for a refund or perhaps send it to a repair center nearby, where are you located?

Anybody's thoughts on this are irrelevant, we have 11 years of real data publicly avaiable:




Difficulty only goes up despite the fact that bitcoin was in a downtrend for almost 5 years combined, they last from 5 months up to 2 years each, difficulty couldn't care less, of course, it does not go up in a straight line but you get the picture.

These trends will keep repeating for years to come, for many obvious reasons which are not within the scope of your question.



it is straightforward, if difficulty doubles your new rewards are cut in half.

It is unlikely to be the fans, it is either heat issue or one of the hashboards is bad, try to unplug chain 8 and see if it stops rebooting.

What do you mean by goes off? Does it shut-down entirely or does it restart? Please explain.