I don't think one person's testimony is enough to end any debate, especially when the reports of users with real world experience of this hardware doesn't support his testimony.

Their behavior is exactly in line with what someone would do if they stole a few thousand Innosilicon BTC miners, likely a product Inno planned to release this year.

It all makes sense, like the deliberate attempts to keep their miners out of the hands of experts, the way they're selling miners for other algorithms (which I don't think exist, and they claim absurd performance: https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/980469619679952898). They just got these Innosilicon BTC miners somehow, showed them to some people in the Bitcoin community to have them vouch for them, and then started selling fake non-existent miners (convenient how they haven't started shipping these?) for other algorithms. There's no ASICBOOST inside the chips, it's just a slightly more efficient Inno BTC miner, and considering how old the S9 is, that's not an impressive accomplishment.

If they actually had ASICBOOST in the chips, we would be seeing more dramatic power savings. The firmware excuse is simply not good enough, how can the firmware be so bad to almost completely remove all your supposed power savings from ASICBOOST?

It's a prototype Innosilicon BTC miner. How Halong has obtained these is anyone's guess? Even the Web UI is just re-skinned/re-shuffled from an existing Inno one: https://i.imgur.com/KzC3RoP.png. If Innosilicon wanted to compete with BITMAIN through Halong as their proxy, surely they would make better effort to hide the association?

Do you guys think there is even any ASICBOOST in the chips? We are not seeing the kind of performance and efficiency gains one would expect. We need some experienced people to reverse engineer this hardware and see what is happening. Something is not adding up here.

Not sure why useful replies are being deleted from this thread? Why delete rightful doubts about purchasing a product, or clear non-trolling replies, what is this excessive stomping down on organic discussion going to achieve?

From what I've heard so far, and discussions in private with people, I'm noticing two things:

- People who ordered bulk units of Dragonmint miners haven't had anything shipped to them
- People who ordered any of the other algo miners also haven't had anything shipped to them (there are "delays")
- There is noticeable secrecy around photos of their miners for other algorithms

Since the Dragonmint control board is clearly an Innosilicon design, and even the Web UI is a simple reskin/reshuffle of the Innosilicon UI. It seems clear what has happened here. And people called this out months ago in this thread. Halong Mining has somehow got their hands on some small volume of a prototype Innosilicon BTC miner, and presented this as their own, and this is what is being shipped to a limited set of customers right now.

Even now, you can visit their Twitter and see they've retweeted a fake Russian story from an "oleg15891" (who is associated with this operation), https://twitter.com/halongmining. The whole thing is starting to stink unfortunately.

Sounds like a really good idea.

Though I think probably the best approach is to completely remove signatures for good. The main purpose of the Bitcoin Forum should be to foster the best quality Bitcoin discussion. A lot of serious discussion takes place on Reddit and Twitter now, even though these platforms are not ideal for in depth unbiased discussion. Reddit is very easy to manipulate and can get circlejerky, and on Twitter people just stick to following people that reinforce their view and rarely expose themselves to contrarian ideas. The forum has the opportunity to be the place for the best discussions to take place, but right now because of these signature campaigns, the majority of the people aren't here for discussion but to make a quick buck.

I guess tolerating the garbage does give the site a lot of traffic, but I'd rather we had a really good quality and clean forum, even if it means ads don't sell as well and activity is reduced somewhat. I remember this place used to have the most interesting people on it, but the quality of the people posting has declined severely. It undermines the collective intelligence of the Bitcoin community too. New users will come on here, and instead of being enlightened, they'll just read through a bunch of senseless drivel, and end up getting involved in some stupid ICO or altcoin that they've seen promoted.

I guess the forum itself could do it, since that probably would be the only way for there to exist a certification service that ICOs will actually feel like they need to go through to attract investors. Otherwise most ICOs will just ignore the certification service since it won't be worth exposing themselves to such scrutiny just to be able to bid to buy advertising.

Maybe there could be two certification products with such a service? A "basic" which would be cheaper but more quick; that would be an analysis to make sure the proposed product is viable and actually makes sense, the people behind it are legitimate and real, and the amount being raised doesn't seem excessive. Then there could be an "advanced" certification scheme which would be more rigorous and involved. Things could be set up so that only ICOs with a basic certification can post, but ICOs with advanced certification can buy advertising and take advantage of signature campaigns.

This has the added benefit that every ICO presented on the forum will at least have gone through a basic check which would push out all the obvious scams. The money earned from proceeds from basic certification can then pay for the in depth research and analysis that would be required to do any advanced certifications.

I think an "Account Issues" child board should be added under Meta. It's difficult to scroll through this section because of these topics about people's accounts getting hacked cluttering up the section.

Why does the alert system have to be in the software itself? Maybe users could be given the option to subscribe via email to receive updates and other information when downloading from https://bitcoin.org/en/download. If you present it well, you can get the email addresses of most of the people downloading the software, then you can just reach them through email whenever you need to inform them about a new version of the software or an issue with the network. Most people do actually check their email often, so you get similar reach as you would with bundling the alert system into the software itself.

Extorting people even if they're an alleged scammer/fraudster is pretty shady to be honest. Too many people on this forum behave like they're some sort of private law enforcement and run around conducting "investigations" and sting operations... 

Hope this will only be a temporary thing. The captcha is pretty annoying.

Happy birthday theymos!

The whitepaper is not a sacred text. It should be updated to make it a useful introduction to Bitcoin. Right now all it does is misinform people.

Whenever I see people link to the whitepaper in the context of the scaling debate, they're usually doing it with malicious intent since they know the whitepaper has multiple flaws, but they take advantage of stuff Satoshi didn't know back then to try to trick users into believing that their side of the debate is sticking to his true "vision".

Agreed that they should be banned. They encourage too many low quality posts. It also undermines the forum's very own advertisements.

If a minority of idiots have to lose their coins to end this drama, then yes, I'm all for that. If anything this recent obsession with "fake news" has taught us, it's that you can't use facts and logic to make these people stop believing this stuff. For every 1 person you convince, another 2 will be drawn into /r/btc through bitcoin.com or something, and subscribe to the same repeated lies that have been debunked.


Probably he felt it was a good use of his time because he thought he was preventing himself from getting smeared, and I imagine it must be hard for him to not respond when most of the abuse is aimed at him and his company. I don't blame him for what he was doing, but all it did was delay things and drag on the debate even further. Why don't we just let them have their insane echo chamber, and let them all fall off a cliff together? Why try to help them?

I love this, seriously, amazing work on this. I support this 100%.

Miners have no business deciding on new features. Maybe in the past it was assumed that miners would go along in the best interests of users, but now it's clear that miners have become too political and keen to push their own agenda.

I'm pretty happy with this ban. Maxwell was the main person on there correcting all the bullshit, and with him gone, it'll only get worse (which I think is good). This debate needs to end, and the only way that will happen is when one side actually decides to pull the trigger and do something crazy, and I think Maxwell being banned makes it more likely that they'll start to believe their nonsense more intensely and go along with something dumb.

Probably when BU fails (just like XT & Classic), a new fork attempt will come along and just be a simple hard fork based on a certain block height (they'll market it as "the way Satoshi intended hard forks to be done!"). By that point, /r/btc will be so full of brainwashed and frustrated idiots that it'll be hard for anything to prevent them going down that road. I hope they lose all their coins.

You guys should stop visiting /r/btc, instead of wasting time correcting their nonsense, the best thing to do is just ignore them and let them get more and more extreme, until they destroy themselves.

I don't like how much we all have to wait around, and campaign, and beg these miners to signal SegWit. In the end, if they delay or reject changes that most of the users and the technical community support, then we need to consider changing the POW and removing them from the network.

If we don't at least seriously consider this option, we might start to see miners more aggressively reject other new features in the future. It makes no sense to give veto power on soft forks to a handful of guys living in some totalitarian hellhole (who knows what their motivations are or will be in future).

I know myself to be conscious (and "alive"), but I can't be sure that the rest of you are actually conscious.

It's strange that you think most active Bitcoin users aren't aware of projects like Classic, XT, etc. Everyone has heard of them, and the block size issue has been argued to death, and yet most users continue to support Core's road map for scalability. Users have made their choice already.

I'm not very active here, and theymos and other staff are running this forum very well, so I prefer to put my efforts into bitcoin.org.

Being a Jr member isn't so bad. It comes with some advantages, such as not having to deal with people messaging me about forum issues like I would if I were an administrator.