Yes, it's worth trying custom firmware like Vnish, and of course, the freezer trick, the success rate on these tricks isn't all great, but since they cost you nothing, you lose nothing.


It's possible to have them repaired (by someone else of course), check this topic


Yup, that's your last resort.


Check on Zuesbtc, although I am sure if you find any, the price will be about 30% of the current price of the mining gear itself, and it could fail at any point, the failure rate on the 17 series gears is so high, I would advise against risking more money, if you can't have them fixed, don't replace them.

انا بصراحة اتشائم من هده الاخبار واعتقد انها بداية النهاية لهده الدورة, انا لا اعرف كم سبق للجميع هنا التواجد في هده الاسواق ولكن المشهد الان يبدو لي مشابها تمام بنهاية عام 2017, اتذكر اخبار jp morgan و ETF وجون مكافي, والعديد من الشركات التي كانت بصدد شراء بتكوين او التعاقد مع مشاريع مثل الريبل و moneygram وغيرها من الاخبار التي ضهرت عند اخر شهرين الى ثلاثة اشهر من قمة ال 2017.

انا لا انكر ان بعض الشركات قد يكونو فعلا مؤمنين بالبتكوين ولكن انا على يقين ان اغلبهم يعتبرونها سلعة عالية الخطورة ولن يحتفطو بها لوقت طويل وتلك الشركات ستجني الارباح عاجلا ام اجلا, وفي النهاية الناس العادية التي تعتقد ان سعر البتكوين سوف يستمر الى مالا نهاية هم فقط من يبقون في السوق, لا اريد بث الذعر ولا افشاء طاقة سلبية ولكن انا فقط اذكر الجميع ان كل هده الاخبار المفرحة اتت تماما قبل الانهيار.

Phill, while your theory does not take away from the fact that bitmain is facing chips shortage just like everyone else, it does make a lot of sense as to why would they do something similar, but the way I see it, it has a very small impact on what's actually going on.


Going with the assumption that we are getting a 1.5% increase and in simple plain math that is 2.3EH, or 20,900 S19 pros, that is still a HUGE amount of hashrate added to the network, of course assuming that all other old gears are already online and hashing which is more likely than not at current prices, I don't think we can do a lot more than 20k S19 pro in two weeks or say 10k per week, in the best (or worst depending on how you want to view it   ) case scenario we would do say 30k S19s pro a week? that's still a tiny amount against the total existing hashrate.

On the other hand, the massive increase in ETH hashrate is due to the fact that it's a GPU coin that was hit by a massive wave of ASIC gears, a single A10 Pro does 750MH, back when this gear was released ETH hashrate was at 250T, which means 20k gears of the like of A10 pros makes 15%, so 20K S19 pro push BTC 2-3% while 20K A10 pro push ETH 15%, add to that the fact the many gamers and hobby miners own GPUs and after the recent spike in price, most started mining, it's assumed that there are over 3 BILLION pc gamers out there, so if 1% of them switch their GPUs to mining and say they own an average GPU of 30mh/s that puts them at 300 terahash which is 75% of the current hashrate.

I don't want to go into more details, but the point here is that it's pretty easy to move GPU-based coins up, while it's harder by a few orders of magnitude to move a huge coin like BTC.

As for the price theory, 99% of other coins are barely above their ATH, nothing so strange about ETH, BTC is probably the only coin that is up 200% from the 2017 highs.

Back to the difficulty prediction, hydropower season is on its way, I expect to see slightly larger jumps than the once we had so far this year,  at 1-2 cents every single gear in China will be overclocked to its max sucking every bit of bitcoin they can before the season is over.

In a nutshell, this means, the hashboard is dead, it's usually caused by a bad chip or a losen heatsink, this is a very common issue that happens to well over 30% of the miners based on an old large sample data ( a few months after release), it's safe to assume that by now it's over 50%, so it really isn't anything unusual.

However, the kernel log isn't showing any signs of the other 2 boards, they are either disconnected from the PSU, or the ribbon cable is out, did you tighten all the screws on all rails?

Here is your last shot, flash this firmware >  Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz   I had some luck with it in the past,


They are trustworthy according to my experience, I believe a few other members here have bought of them and can vouch, but of course, you trade at your own risk.

There are a few things to troubleshoot, let's start with the one which has the most likelihood of being the cause.

Your miner is labeled as 76th:


But after 30 mins of mining, it shows:


This means one of the hashboards fails after running for a while, and according to this:


Chain 0 is more likely to be it than chain 1 or 2, so what I would do is disconnect chain 0 and see if the miner stops going into sleep mode, which I believe it will, and then post the results.

As basic as this sounds, many people don't understand it, generally speaking, mining beats hodling only during sideways / accumulation phases, where the value of BTC against fiat isn't going anywhere for an extended period of time and holding BTC doesn't make you more BTC nor more fiat, that will be a paradise for mining.

The other two phases of the market are either an extended bull like that one we are in or an extended bear,  you have perfectly explained the bull scenario and I think it's pretty clear to everyone, the bear scenario will heavily depend on your own ways of dealing with the market if you are a perma-bull who plans to hodl for "eternity" then buying gears is the better option, if you prefer to stay as liquid as possible to potentially exit while the exit gates are still empty, then you would want to hodl BTC rather than a mining gear, I mean it takes a second to sell your BTC but takes a lot longer to sell your mining gears.

Another major factor that many seem to ignore is that mining gears have a limited timespan, it either becomes unprofitable to mine or slowly fails and dies, while hodling BTC costs almost nothing and it has no lifespan to it (well, unless you mess up with the security measures and you lose it) but well, your mining gears can catch fire.

Now back to the specific case of OP, your power rates is far from competitive, during this mania (which I believe will end soon) you could make a profit with almost every gear you buy, but once it's over you will be competing against the average 4-5 cents and the 1-2 cents during the hydro season in China (which lasts for about half of the year), so if you are not in the 30w/t range you will be forced to shut-down your miners, I would not buy mining gears at such prices, but if you decide to do so anyway, try to stick to the most efficient gears so that you can at least ROI on the fiat value you are going to pay.

As for where to buy from, I have just answered a similar question here, feel free to check it out.

You should post the kernel log (using the code like so)


A screenshot of both the main page as well as the miner status page would help as well, do so after disconnecting one hashboard as phill explained, unplugged the 3 6pin connectors alone will do.

You did almost everything anyone would probably tell you to do, there is not much to be done here, it's not uncommon to see all 63 asics alive but 0 hashrate, sometimes reducing the frequency and/or increasing the voltage on that particular hashboard could bring it to life, so try that with Braiin'Os, if that doesn't work, I think you should stop wasting time and let the other two hashboards hash along.

As long as you are getting a fan error you should ignore everything else as the miner might work just fine when the fan is replaced, don't attempt to flash a different firmware until you change fan [4], if the problem persists you can go ahead with the recovery firmware and flash any firmware you like, avoid the most recent as it would lock your miner.

Do you mean board 2 works fine on its own but not when plugged in with either board 1 or 3? this line is a bit confusing, but i'd guess based on the system status on the image you uploaded is that you should flash different firmware, all your hash boards showing 63 Asics which is a good sign that either the firmware/control board or a PSU is causing the issue.

Try to flash this multi-option version (Antminer-S9i-xilinx-201907302056-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF-sig.tar.gz) from the official website and then try the different settings, start with -2th and see if you get any different results on your second hashboard.

Please use code tag to post the kernel log, it looks so messy and hard to read.

A quick report:


Your chain 2 which is the to the most right seems dead, your miner should be hashing just fine with 2 boards at 2/3 the hashrate which would be at about 25-27th, but in the kernel log I see something strange here:


These temps are not normal by any means, is it freezing cold where the miner is running? also what firmware does it use? please post a few screenshots of the status and main page.

It works now but it will eventually fail as long as it's mining on Nicehash you should expect to face all kind of issues ahead, including but not limited to your funds being "hacked",  and you don't really make any extra mining on Nicehash, in fact, the last 7 days Nicehash made 3% less profit in BTC against mining directly to a PPS pool, the on-going difficulty changing and all the mess they create will go to as far as bricking your gear and many of us here have personal experience with such issues.

The only time I would consider nicehash is if there is a massive temporary pump on the rates there, and that will be for a quick run and I'd leave, but mining 24/7 on Nicehash is a terrible idea regardless of how you look it at.

philipma1957, a fellow bitcointalk member, a very nice lad.


It won't consume power, maybe a tiny amount, but it will slow down the boot, the miner will keep trying to read asics for a few seconds, so just unplug the power cord and leave it there.


Given that the value of each hash board is slightly less than 33% (You have a control board and a PSU) that's a decent deal, the seller was really more than decent to give you such a refund.

No, they are slightly different in size, not the overall size but the heatsink size on both directions are different, shorter on one side and taller on the other, so you can't fit 3 S9 hash boards in an S9i case, it's easy to spot a fake S9i but not a fake S9j, hope that makes sense.

I am 100% sure they are S9s with the J sticker, or S9j miner with S9 boards inside, at $350 per S9j they could just sell that in China at a much higher profit, so be careful when prices are too good to be true, always double-check with grace, scott and the other reliable resllers.

Not quite accurate, it's more like this:

DO NOT BUY S9k and S9SE.
avoid S9 unless it's pretty cheap.
If you trust the seller, go for S9j.
if you don't trust the seller, go for S9i.

The difference between I and J is really nothing at all, so all in all, it doesn't matter, but many sellers will put the S9j sticker on the S9 and sell it as S9j which they can't do with S9i, so unless you know the origin of the miner or truly trust the seller, S9i will be the best to buy.


Fair? in my standards? I can't tell, I have bought them as cheap as $40-50, it's too hard to stomach the fact that they go for about $500 today, on the 28th of last month I bought a few for a client at $450 each excluding shipping, BTC price was at about 47k, now we are up to 54-56k so my guess is that they are back to $500+ range in China.

I believe China is the best place to get your miners fixed, check Zeusbtc they have repair centers there, you could also send it to Bitmain although someone mentioned they told him they can't ship the gear back and they offered him some coupons instead, and a buyer for those coupons lol.


Yes pretty normal, it will work sometimes and won't on the others, eventually, it will just die.

In the kernel log before you flashed the junk piece of firmware your 3 hash boards were showing 63 Asics which is great


You are asking for troubles when using Nicehash as your pool, and you are asking for even more troubles by using their firmware, get rid of that firmware and test your miner on a proper pool, use F2pool or Viabtc, flash Bitmain firmware (avoid the 2019-2020 versions) and repost your results.

It's not displayed on the miner status because it's powred off by miner.


In plain English, this is a dead hashboard, the S9 you bought could be 4 years old and has not rested expected for the shipping duration to your address, it's perfectly normal for it to lose a board or two, and 90% of the time it starts with the middle board exactly like how your miner did, the middle board doesn't have the best air-flow due to the fan motor, that's why some people like phill use a spacer to allow more cooling.

You could try the basic PSU / ribbon cables switching but chances are, it's a dead hashboard just leave it there and mine with the other 2 boards.