heh heh, only in America will ya see something like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVlc0lEpErc
The inaugural Oscar Mayer Wiener mobile race at the Indianapolis 500 race track that ran yesterday. All 6 wiener mobiles from around the country do 2 laps. Race itself starts at 15:45 mark.

Just in: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/16/business/moody-us-credit

Moody’s downgrades the U.S. government, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs

Moody’s Ratings downgraded the United States’ debt on Friday, stripping the country of its last perfect credit rating. The move could rattle financial markets and push up interest rates, potentially creating an additional financial burden for Americans already struggling with tariffs and inflation.

Of the three major credit rating agencies, Moody’s was the lone holdout, maintaining its outstanding rating of AAA for US debt. Moody’s held a perfect credit rating for the United States since 1917.  It now ranks US creditworthiness one notch below that, at Aa1, joining Fitch Ratings and S&P, which lowered their credit ratings for US debt in 2023 and 2011, respectively.

The decision to downgrade debt was influenced by “the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns,” Moody’s said in a statement. Moving forward, Moody’s said it expects borrowing needs to continue to grow and for it to weigh on the US economy as a whole. .

Can't wait to see how Trumpolini tries to spin this one...  

Governor Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire posted on her X page: "New Hampshire is once again First in the Nation! Just signed a new law allowing our state to invest in cryptocurrency and precious metals" - https://x.com/KellyAyotte/status/1919783147463426283

ref https://blockspace.media/insight/cbp-ramps-up-asic-miner-crackdown-with-seizures-new-import-holds/
 and
https://www.theblock.co/post/340756/border-patrol-expands-bitcoin-mining-machine-seizures-to-microbt-and-canaan-units-blockspace

In short it is because some use chips from Sophgo (Sophon) which is a company that is under restrictions because they also sold chips to Huawei. Initially was mostly just Bitmain miners but the 'inspections' are expanding to those from Canaan and MicroBT as well.

BTW: also TSMC has cancelled all work for Sophgo because of this.

In Hong Kong an appeals court voted to ban the song "Glory to Hong Kong' from being played and distributed. They aim to not only ban it from Hong Kong (and China) but are also pushing for it to be removed from the internet. Good luck with that last bit...
https://apnews.com/article/hong-kong-protest-song-banned-629bb787a0d4cd46a424f2696b214d41

Chinese version of song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPJESCpanq8
English version of song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXZNOecZreY
Wiki link about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_to_Hong_Kong

1st was by a miner on -ck solo pool https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.msg64033268#msg64033268
Link to mempool for -ck block

3hrs later another on the solo portion of Kano's pool https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.msg64033145#msg64033145
Link to mempool for Kano block

I imagine the usual crypto 'news' sites will have a field day with this...

Congrats to both winners!

Now there are plans in progress to archive vintage Nintendo console games in them.
One fun bit is that the code for playing them through a Web-3 based emulator is stored there as well.

TL;DR
    Bitcoin developers have unveiled a project that will allow them preserve Nintendo games with Ordinals.
    SNES emulator on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Thoughts?

As the topic says, so far a hamster is beating the investment odds better than 'most traders' https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58707641  

The first month was rough. Mr Goxx started on 12 June with €326 (£278), placing an order for Stellar (XLM). One month and 95 orders later, Goxx Capital was down 7.3%.

But as of 27 September, the intrepid trader's career performance is up 19.41%

Wonder what it knows/picks up that us Humans don't. It's doing better than my interpreting the spots on goat innards....

[Edit: local rules -]

Since Phil has not started one yet for this year guess I will
Damn 2021 has started with a bang!
=
For a while, skyrocketing exchange rate despite falling diff. Whoda thunk it?
Finally looks like hash rate is picking up as older miners go back online and newer gear is throttled up to full speed along with newest gear finally starting to come online.

One very interesting development is the US gov looking into restrictions on private wallets. Well not restrictions per se, more like tagging tx's to/from them for further scrutiny. Couple that with at least 1 huge mining group throwing their hash behind censored transactions and miners in the USA will be more monitored than ever.

Methinks 2021 is going to be very interesting  
Now in true Blockchain fashion, time to see if this gets 'validated' or orphaned..
For completeness:
here is Phil's 2020 thread
and his 2019 thread

Edit: local rules - no trolling, no cloud mining ads, no unicorn 500TH mining gears buy links, no off-topic (non-BTC) clickbait, etc. Such posts WILL be deleted by me!

  While I'm allowing a wide range of discussion here it must at least be related to things that affect Bitcoin mining difficulty such as new hardware, current events, phase of the moon, etc. While *some* discussion of alts in relation to their effect on BTC diff will be allowed, crap coin discussion must be kept to a minimum. Continued hammering on alts vs BTC is right-out.

  Unaccompanied children found here will be given a large 'duba' of espresso, candy and a puppy before being returned to their parents.

1st off, a disclaimer - I've exclusively mined @ kano.is since late 2014 so am rather spoiled when it comes to stats .

That said, in another discussion the topic of a pools back-end monitoring came up. If a pool has a comprehensive database running as a back-end tracking miner type, shares sent/received, worker diff, IP stats, share results eg stale, hi/lo/dupes etc. to make sure everything is running as expected then it should also provide their users with fairly detailed stats. After, all, data collection and generating tailored reports *is* what a DB is written for...

If other pools have a back-end DB, how do things happen like the Slush kerfuffle a few years back? Inattention to operations? Just not caring to track things?

Running a pool IS running a financial enterprise and must be treated as such.

My questions are: What kind of stats do the various pools  eg, Antpool, ViaBTC, F2pool, etc. provide? Can (and will) they pull up records of past performance when asked by their users?

Obviously, truly large farms with hundreds/thousands of miners will be connecting to a pool through a proxy(s) to minimize connections and their proxies will show up as a single (very large) miner or groups of miners but even they should be able to pull up stats regarding what the pool sees.

It'd be interesting to hear what users of the other pools have to say

edit: This is worker stats from part of my farm pointed at Kano.is:

As insiders have known for many years now, a chips' node size has become a pointless and erroneous measure of what the dimensions inside of a chip actually are and not-so-useful in defining what the chip performance can be.

Looks like a new definition is in the works to better reflect actual progress being made. ref https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_2020/the_node_is_nonsense.html

My take on it is that companies like MicroBt and Canaan made the right choice by staying at 16nm for so long and relying on the fact that the Market forces driving the quest for lower 'node size' for things like memory, CPU's, GPU's etc as well as mining chips are at the same time benefiting the higher nodes. How?

Easy - use for example the '16nm node' that MicroBt and Canaan used for their respective M10/M20 and A10xx series miners. My guess is that TSMC applied lower-node metal interconnect tech to the now much cheaper 16nm node. Smaller/thinner metalization interconnect layers means lower switching losses improving efficiency while still using the larger (and cheaper, fully mature) 16nm gate size. It keeps the long ago paid for 16nm foundries busy while providing decent performance chips at far lower cost than cutting edge chips like BM's 7nm and now their bleeding-edge 5nm node size...

AFAIK the M30x from MicroBT use what, 12nm 8nm chips? I know Canaan is still smarting from the 7nm A921 debacle: They and/or Samsung rather blew it on that chip so even now their latest A1066 is still a brick of 16nm chips sourced from TSMC.

Edit: Earlier this year Canaan mentioned an A1166 but not sure what 'node size' it is/was supposed to be. They've been mighty quiet about it ever since.
Edit edit: The A11's specs say it has 342 of their A3205 16nm ASIC

[A high number of shares doesn't indicate that the DevFee pools are taking all hashrate - it's a result of the low difficulty level for each of the shares.]

I saw mention of it in version notes for the past couple AM upgrades and so far have seen no mention of it here.
Anyone try it yet? ref https://www.awesomeminer.com/antminerfirmware Not sure if it requires also running AM to access it.

I only have 2 s9's left running so can't say I can give it a good test but seems the same as other 2% dev fee custom firmware here where one pays for the privilege of being able to tweak the heck out of a S9.

About the fee: This the first custom FW that clearly spells out how the 2% dev fee works.
From their above web page:

With a total hashrate of 15TH/s, no more than 0.3TH/s will be used for the mining fee.

The mining fee consist of two pools named DevFee that are running mining in parallel with a slow speed mining. Please note that because of the slow speed these two pools are working with a very low difficulty level, resulting in that they will produce quite high number of accepted shares. A high number of shares doesn't indicate that the DevFee pools are taking all hashrate - it's a result of the low difficulty level for each of the shares.

Again, curious if anyone has had a chance to kick the tires on this FW. Does it use the known security risk xnonce for the parallel mining?

edit: added emphasis to the dev pool hashrate

Well researchers have produced transistors as small as 2.5nm using techniques that look compatible with current bleeding-edge 7nm processes. Smallest 3d transistors yet

Now given the current downturn in the market I do not see these showing up in miners anytime soon, hell, 7nm miners are just out and sales are - meh, but still... Thoughts?

[A LOT]

Just got a s9 batch-17 and... Bitmain has changed the firmware.
I will post in detail tomorrow but for a summary of changes:

• They have changed the board channels used and so the temp reporting channels. Now using channels 6, 7, and 8.
• Looks like changing the frequency may be gone. There is no longer a GUI option to change it. On startup, the firmware goes through several checks per-board and sets the best freq and possibly Vcore as well per-board. When all is done, the boards report different frequencies. This could turn out to be rather -- interesting.
• Looking at the Kernel Log it shows several lists of freq and voltage it tries for each board. A note at the beginning of each list says that freq is now stored in the PIC. Now does that mean that a warm boot bypasses the testing -- dunna know but hope so.

I'll post the Kernel Log tomorrow. Also fan speed no longer has a setting on the BMminer GUI. Log says is set as needed starting at 40% Oh, the fans are on different channels as well. Think fans are now reported in position 6 an 8. I'll verify tomorrow. edit: Fans in positions 3 and 6

Due to the time it takes for the new booting process -- around 4 min or more -- better set dead miner/offline/etc monitoring to wait at least that 4 maybe even 5 min before trying to issue another reboot call to the miner...

Frankly, during the setup process for miner name and pool assignments the reboots needed were taking so long that I thought the miner was going to be a DOA!   Folks, keep in mind that much longer time needed to come to life before you start to get miffed/worried like I was. A couple times when it was taking A LOT longer than was normal with the earlier batches I forced reboots trying to get the miner to respond. thankfully it didn't brick.

This started about 15 min ago, around 6:55p Eastern
Note card-3 (chain 4)


After a soft boot STILL card 3!


WHAT in the HELL???

Has anyone paid attention to the power input area of the s9 hash boards? This detail I took from the pic of of the s9  board posted in the ad for it shows:


In the lower-left, doesn't that look suspiciously like a programming port for a voltage controller? The switching FET's are there under the heatsink (nice touch!) as well as a honking big inductor so I have to assume that the s9 does use a buck regulator.

Hmm. Curious minds have to wonder what might be done with that...