Almost every media article you read on the internet will have the term "complex mathematical equations", someone wrote that a few years ago and it seems to have stuck in most people's minds so this is what most of them think about mining, a supercomputer that solves mathematical problems.

This is probably why many people think an average quantum computer will beat a billion ASIC miners combined, given that QC uses quantum parallelism to solve "complex mathematical equations" in parallel. , which makes perfect sense if mining was all about solving complex math equations.

Seems like a good amount of hashrate went offline, in less than a day from Phil's post, the pace dropped 1.2%.


of course, not much time left to bring it to negative, so maybe 1.3x %, but the next epoch will be interesting to watch, we will likely start with a large negative pace especially given the drop in BTC price, even the stock market took some serious losses in the past a few days, so no sign of price recovery yet, even more reasons to believe that difficulty is more likely to drop than go up.

On their Twitter, Bitmain announced a new gift, a 13% enhancement in efficiency for the S19 pro, of course, Christmas is not here yet and you have to wait till the 20th of Dec to get it.

It would be fun to watch how the new update will perform, is it going to be 25.5w/th at the same default hashrate of 100-110th? or something like the custom firmware out there, maybe 60-70th to get to that 25w/th mark? if it's really 2500w/100th that would be a huge improvement, and of course, fuel for mining difficulty.

To save you time and effort, your issue and OP's issues are completely unrelated, the 17 series have a known issue with the chip to PCB soldering, your issue is different, use the multi-option firmware by Bitmain and drop the hashrate by 2th, this will likely fix the issue for you, it seems like the bad board (probably 1 or 2 chips on it) can't deal with the default frequency.

If the issue isn't solved, you are going to need to use firmware that allows you to tune each chip individually, either Vnish or BO+, the tunning will lower the frequency on the bad chips and it will hopefully get it to a stable state where rebooting is no longer needed.

In theory that is correct, but practically and in real life, it isn't dead accurate, because the following quote is incorrect


Nicehash is a marketplace where people place their 'bids' to accurate a certain amount of the hashrate that is available for rent, in the unlikely event that there is more hashrate available than demand for it, nicehash would probably point it to a PPS pool and pay you accordingly, aside from that, the buyers set the price, not the sellers, if you check the average profitability of NH vs BTC PPS pools, you will always see a variation, the last 3 days NH buyers paid 5% more PPS+ pools, in some rare occasions it becomes more, I was able to mine for a few hours (maybe a full day, can't recall) on NH and got like 7 times more profit because someone was paying a ton of money for hashrate to mine some shitcoin.

Also, there is no guarantee that the renting price per hash would go down with the difficulty increase if there are enough opened and funded orders that pay 0.00367/PH/day even after a difficulty increase of 10%, there is no guarantee that you will get a 10% discount on whatever you rent after the diff change, and the same thing is true for the opposite side of the argument.

However, it's worth mentioning that your theory still stands though not perfectly, due to the fact that most buy orders on NH are probably made by bots, after a diff change to the upside, you usually see a few orders that still pay the same per hash as they paid prior to the change (those are probably humans or badly coded bots), the rest of orders will start to adjust accordingly.

A 1% fee on PPS+ is surely not sustainable, the amount of BTC reserve you need for that is just insane, even super large pools can't get that to work for them, also the hourly payout isn't very doable IMO.

There is really nothing good about a random pool coming out, it doesn't help with decentralization it just ends up going bankrupt, causing small miners to lose money, to run a considerable pool size today you need a lot of money, many of these smaller pools actually are nothing but a relay/proxy that uses other large pools, not to mention names but if you were to dig into it you would see that.

 

Twice? I thought it was only once back in 2016, never heard of the other incident.

Anyway, their status page still shows




It doesn't seem like Riot moved to another pool yet, not sure what the deal was! but I don't see 7EH gone from slush, their reported hashrate has been 14EH long before the Riot news came out, it's been 12 days into the new month of December, with no signs of them leaving, it's strange, to be honest.

Yes the two models do exist, true the J versions use 5nm and the non J use 7nm but that does not mean the 5nm version is more efficient, the number of chips and how they clock thems is what matters.

The J is said to be more efficient by a tiny bit, it seems like availability and price is what matters to most buyers.

Pro vs non Pro is indeed a huge difference, so try to get the Pro, if J and non J are the same price get the J if not get the Pro non j.

Nearly 4$ billion in loans need to be paid back to the lenders, the issue I see with most of these large players is having to repay loans+ interest or else! margin call, the option of "shut down now and turn miners back on later when they can make you profit" probably isn't available for 90% of the miners out there, this is where small mining operations that aren't based on debt beat the large farms, it will only cost you 20 steps to the garage to hit that circuit breaker, the larger player who is chained in contacts from different lenders, employees, power company contracts, tax, and so many other craps can't afford to hit the switch.

What they will do is either borrow more money if they can or silently liquidate some assets (BTC or gears) to maintain the loan, I don't know all the details of the various different companies, but I know a large amount of that 4$ billion isn't going to be repaid.

The S19 pros are pretty reliable when compared to the previous 17 series, there haven't been any significant issues reported, they have some funky PSUs and that's all about it, so make sure you get a spare PSU just in case you need it. The "i' version is the only exception, it sucks and it's the cheapest out there, I'd stay away from it.

When compared to M30s+ which are almost in the same efficiency group, the MicroBT beats the S19 pro by a slight difference in terms of reliability,  none of this is my own personal experience, but I dig into so many telegram groups and I know I few folks who own a dozen of each, so I am just relaying that information here for everyone's benefits.

Riot makes sense, Slush luck for the past month or 250 blocks was 80%, on the probablitiy scale that's very unusual, folks on telegram are talking about a possible bug/attack on slush that caused them to lose nearly 50 blocks.

Of course, a lot of digging needs to be done before reaching to any conclusion, but I don't think they will recover easily from that bad month soon.

So if 20% of Slush's 14EH was not finding blocks for other reasons other than luck, most of it will now start to find blocks.

اعتقد ان هدا الامر جيد فهوا اعتراف ضمني من تلك الدول ان العملات المشفرة هي "عملات" ذات قيمة, ففرض الضريبة عليها يجعلها مثل الدهب او الفضة, القانون في ايطاليا واغلب دول العالم يقتضي التصريح بممتلاكاتك, وايضا التصريح بالمكاسب التي تحصلت عليها من التجارة.

بالنسبة لامكانية ان تعرف الحكومة ماتملكه من كريبتو فالامر ممكن جدا وليس مستحيل, البلوك تشين يعتبر كتاب مفتوح للجميع وقد طورت الشركات والدول برامج تتبع متقدمة جدا, طبعا في حال عدم استخدام المنصات التي تطلب تعريف الهوية وغيرها, واتباع بعض خطوات الخصوصية سيكون الامر صعب جدا, ويمكن ان تخفي ماتملكه وتبيعه وتشتري غيره لعشرات السنوات دون علم السلطات, ولكن المسئلة هنا هي مسئلة ثقافة شعوب, تلك الشعوب تخاف من عواقب القانون, وفي العادة التهرب الضريبي يعتبر جريمة, لا احد يريد المخاطرة ب 10 سنوات من حياته في السجن ليخفي 5 قطع ايثيريوم يمتلكها عن الحكومة.

They own 7.7EH + whatever else on slush and they can not handle the variance, running thier own pool will only make it worse, all these large players will end up being in a very large pool to reduce variance effects.

@stompix, you got it right this time, let's stop here

That's likely the case, judging by gear prices, especially the used ones, it seems like a lot of selling is going on, it seems like we are in the process (not sure if it's the start of the end) of miners capitulation, who would have thought the S19j pro would be going for 15$ in the U.S, it seems like many med sized miners are being forced to leave the game.

I also read some interesting article about Riot, it seems like they had a bad month due to luck variance on the pool they used, despite adding 12% more hashrate, the only made 2% more BTC, and now they are going to switch to a PPS pool.

When large players like Riot can't handle payout variance like that, it gives you a clear indication that the game is becoming harder for everyone.

I just want to point out two things here, most antivirus software are not very mining friendly, they will block/delete Whatsminer tools, they would block even web access to some miner's webpages, and some monitoring programs will also have a very hard time running with antivirus installed, so a few exceptions will need to be put into whichever security measures you run on your PC, some folks prefer not to run any at all which is a double edge sword.

I found Kaspersky to be the most paranoid, it won't even allow you to submit a webpage that contains a stratum URL, of course, if you know all the things to allow beforehand it would be great, otherwise, every time you try to download a new monitoring software or new firmware you would be forced to make adjustments accordingly.

As for the used miner, flashing firmware from the webpage isn't going to get rid of common viruses like NightSwitcher, some versions of those viruses are pretty sophisticated, when you flash a new firmware they will show you that everything went fine, it will start hashing to your own pool, and then later on "probably where the name NightSwiticher came from" it will start mining to the hacker's pool.

The only way around this would be using Sdcard to flash the miner, it works like 99% of the time, but to be super safe, after the sdcard flash you would still do this


Just in case the virus was able to disable the bootloader on your control board, and thus making that Sdcard flash useless.

** You don't need to connect the miner to a PC when flashing Sdcard, just read the manual and you will figure out if it was successful based on the led blinking patterns, could be 10 flashes, could be 5 reds, could be 10 greens, you just need to know what the process looks like and then you don't have to risk infecting the secondary PC you use.

How do you know your miners didn't hit any block when mining to those PPS pools? it's pretty hard to keep track unless you use monitoring software that gives you alerts when one of the miners hits a block, the miner log itself would reset with every reboot so your miners could very well have hit a couple of blocks without you knowing.

That is only valid for older miners, S9k / S9se being the last model that could run on any 12V PSU, doesn't matter if it's a computer PSU or any other PSU that has enough 6-pins and outputs 12V DC, but later on starting from S11 onwards, the design of the antminer changed from 6-pin connectors to a busbar with direct contact to the hashboards (the control board still run on the 12V DC).

So aside from the program issue that thierry4wd mentioned, you are going to run into an issue with alignments, the design of those PSUs is slightly different, the output voltage is also different and it's no more the standard 12V DC.

This is like going to a coffee shop forum and asking if their business is making them any money, if everyone was honest enough you would hear all kinds of answers, one will say they got rich in 2 years, someone else will tell you they have been making coffee for 5 years and have yet to ROI their espresso machine, another one will tell you his story of losing his house for the loan he took to open his business, all of them could be valid answers.

The same thing applies to mining, there are many different factors involved, your power rate, capital, is it a loan or your own money? capacity? the distance between your house and the nearest neighbor, do you come from a country that's friendly to Russia and enjoys cheap gas and oil or are your country's gas reserves running out and they are going to double up on the power prices? you might think I am joking, but I am dead serious, all the factors mentioned above are critical in determining a successful mining business vs a dead one.

I can't possibly list all the things you need to consider, but if you provide as much information as you can, the answers you get will be more likely to be accurate.

I know you weren't directly accusing him of such a thing, but when reading this part of your post


It gives people who did not follow the full story of this debate the impression of Kano "might" be doing something else with the money they send him other than running those solo runs, of course, just like you I can't verify where that money goes to, heck even when I participated in Willi's run I didn't even check for how long the run lasted or what was the hashrate, it would be too much work, so for these solo runs, TRUST is everything, it's either you trust the person that runs the run or you don't.

I am on your side in regards to how Kano plays the privacy and anonymity cards and accuses other pools or people who do the runs to be reckless and don't care about users' anonymity, I did explain the pros and cons of using Ckpool vs Kano in respect to anonymity (or more accurately pseudonymity), and I think the same thing applies to your way and Willi's vs Kano's ways.

I mean really, this anonymity shit that many people are obsessed about is just funny, many people think they are Satoshi, and everyone out there is waiting for them to make a mistake so they can figure out their identity, , of course, I am not saying you should KYC folks who join solo runs but come on, there is nothing wrong with publicly posting your transaction for that run, using a bold "MASKS OFF" in that statement makes it feel like they are posting their naked photos on the internet to be accepted into a solo run.

So my final words, I think you two should stop being at each other's throats, you are doing a good job with your runs, and he is doing a good job with his pool's runs, if anything, you, him, and Willi should have been working together on something fancier that operates the runs.

I don't really want to participate in this debate, but I think what you quoted regarding discord is more of lack of knowledge than evil intentions, Kano is the type of person who thinks he knows everything and that he is always right, he probably thinks whatever information he has regarding how discord works is unquestionable, it will be pretty hard for him to accept that he was wrong about it even if discord folks themselves tell him that he is.

However, regardless of his attitude and the "unfriendly character", I highly doubt he was/is trying to map users' info or trick anyone, I also think it's extremely unlikely that he would steal users' funds and not actually do those solo runs, generally, I think he is a genuine person who isn't easy to blend in with.

And by the way, I don't know anything about how discord works, I only used it a couple of times, and honestly, I think it's retard.