I am not very familiar with BO+ tuning but I believe it's similar to vnish, on BO+ you set a power limit on your miner which the firmware will try to achieve either by underclocking or overclocking certain boards/chips individually, similar to Vnish if you set a target so high which one of the boards can't stand the firmware would start to ignore your "target" and slowly adjust the setting to the downside until all chips become stable.

So setting a high profile from the get-go is not a good idea, the miner could take forever to actually get to a stable state, the best approach would be setting a profile/power limit similar to the stock, so something like 14TH on Vnish, or 1250w on BO+, then check the chip's status, if they are happy with the setting for 2-3 hours, you can try another push, maybe 1350w or 15th, if the miner takes too long to finish tunning it's probably telling you that your miner's capabilities are way far below what you are asking.

So in the above example if the tuning takes too long, fall back to 1300W or 14.5th, if the miner is happy with 1350w or 15th and your PSU is capable and you want to push it, go 1450w/16th, despite having to monitor the miner for a few hours, this is a lot safer and faster than going to 16th/1450w straight, because if your mine can only do 13th/1200w it will take so many hours for the runner to step down from 16th/1450w and you will think that the firmware isn't working when in fact you are pushing your miner way too hard.

Also, I don't recall if there is a default setting for ASICBOOST on BO+ but on Vnish it comes disabled, so make sure you enable it before tuning.

Stock S9 doesn't do asicboost, it was added later on to their firmware, the MAJORITY of the S9s I bought from China came with the stock 2017 firmware that didn't have ASICboost, and since most people don't do enough research about mining, I tend to believe that the majority of S9s out there run on non-asicboot firmware.

Nice detailed thread, perhaps you should sum it up, you know, we human beings nowadays don't seem to have enough mood to spare on reading long threads.

I think I have a proposal for you, I would guess that most users won't trust you with a whole block (nothing personal) but many would still trust you with 20$ / 0.001 BTC, so why not act a like a pool for Willis' block party?

See Willi doesn't want to have to deal with more than 10 folks per run which we all understand, so he wants each person to join in with 0.01BTC, many of us can't afford to play with that amount every week, so why not collect 0.001 BTC from 10 guys and then send it to willi as 0.01BTC and then if willi hits a block you get that 0.001BTC and pass it to your guys?

I'd assume willi might even be willing to do that for you assuming your guys don't trust you even with 1 block / 10 worth of BTC, even if willi doesn't want it, I am sure someone else who is trusted enough by most people here would be willing to do it for you at a small cost if not for free, you can have a public agreement with willi that if your group address wins anything the amount has to go to 10 addresses.

By doing something like that you will bypass the trust issue, Willi would be able to do his runs more often since you will be helping him collect enough BTC for the run, the small fish who can't afford $200 to play with will be happy to risk 20$, it's a win-win for almost everyone involved (except for you of course since you will be doing a bit of work  ), but it does seem like you are going to enjoy it anyway.

I took Cambridge study as a reference, of course, it could be totally wrong.




"May the ships sink where they may", although I don't think it's that bad, not sure what they gain from declaring bankruptcy, they have a large infrastructure and a few hundred thousand of mining gears that are worth a lot more than the cash they hold now, but I am also sure they are not doing great.

I was talking with a Chinese supplier earlier and rumor has it that some of those large orders from Bitmain were canceled, it's probably why they brought their gear prices down for a while, lots of ready stock for some buyer who no longer wants the gears, not exactly sure how do these large guys make the contract with Bitmain, but these Chinese resellers are actually pretty close to Bitmain and I tend to believe that their info is valid.

These are Bitmain coupons, which can be used to deduct 30% of miner cost or anything else you buy from their website ( you can read more about them on Bitmain's website).

I am selling them for 40% disscount, minumum quantity is $5,000 worth of coupons which is $3,000 in BTC/USDT.

PM me if you are interested.

I'd wait till Nov 13 and then start bugging them with emails.


When altcoins of any kind do better than BTC -- it's somehow good for BTC difficulty, I'd imagine that there is at least one person on earth who really needs to choose between running a BTC miner or an alt-miner due to some power constraints, so ya, you have a valid point.

As for those altcoins to lead us into a bull move, I highly doubt it, dogecoin only spiked because of Musk - Twitter, and I honestly think it's going to come crashing soon, but the despite that we need to keep in mind that doge has a market of cap of nearly 15B while BTC is close to 400B, it's so easy to move the former, all it needs is a few large players buying it, but with a huge market cap like BTC it takes some huge stuff to move it, like the fed to stop raising rates and for the world superpowers to sit down and start negation terms for ending the war in Ukraine.

I believe it doesn't matter what elon tweets, until the feds bring rates down, we wouldn't see any sustain spikes in any crypto currency.


Did you account for the fact that they shipped it out a bit too early? it was supposed to be 30 days after shipment, no?



Back to difficulty:

We are back into positive as of now


only 5 days left on this epoch, so nothing much can change from here own, it's a slight drop or a small increase.

I wonder if things like the Colorado river would affect mining in the U.S, specifically California, I'd assume the dam they have there produces a good amount of hydraulic power, California has nearly 10% of the total hashrate in the states, I read the federal government would be cutting water supply to a few states west of Colorado, and CA is one of them.

Now time for some more math.

The current hashrate is estimated to be 280EH, to get it us a 10% increase, we need to add 28EH worth of hashrate.

28EH = 140,000 S19 pro hydro = 770 MW  = > 500M
28EH = 280,000 S19 pro          = 840 MW = about $500M

And from their own, it just gets worse, I don't think the world can spare nearly a billion dollars every 2 weeks and invest in BTC mining, IMO while BTC price is below 30k, 300EH hashrate is not sustainable, past 350E is near impossible.
 
In fact, I'd assume that so many of the current players are hanging by a thread, they would be lucky to keep their current operation on till the bull come and save them - let alone invest more money in mining, so I'd say it again, we have either hit the difficulty top or we are pretty close, and until the most left digit on the price charts goes from 2 to 3, this assumption still stands.

For a very long time, I thought that was the case, which is why I "excused them" for why trying so hard to lock the miners, but it does not seem to be the case, many people would flash custom firmware on their brand new gears, overclock the heck out of them, and if something goes wrong, they would just revert to stock firmware, send the gear for warranty and Bitmain would happily fix it.

So, it's either Bitmain doesn't know about the existence of custom firmware, or they know, and they just can't be bothered.

What Whatsminer does on the other hand is they would give you the "special" overclocking firmware if you contact them directly, it's not publicly available, so they probably need to attach it to your own mining gear and then automatically take that gear out of warranty.

But we are not even talking about overclocking here, we are talking about underclocking, which is even better for said companies, if people run their miners a lot cooler and at lower clocks, this would result in fewer repair tickets, it almost seems like these companies want their gears to die so they can sell you the next generation, it looks as if they try to ensure that gear won't break during the warranty period at stock but then break right after. . I know that may not be the case, but I can't think of a better reason why won't they allow us to underclock our gears!

I don't think we went way off-topic here (maybe a little), but we are addressing the resistance to change on these manufacturers' behalf. When they won't even add an option to allow users to change fan speed -- we should not expect them to rush into implementing something like Stratum V2.

بغض النظر عن بعض المشاكل التقنية المتعلقة بشبكة البرق, اعتقد ان العائقين الرئيسين هم كالاتي:

1- الجانب القانوني:

كما يعلم الجميع ان البتكوين لا تتمتع بالخصوصية, طبعا من المؤسف والمضحك ان نرى بعض الجرائد وقنوات اليوتيوب وحتى التلفاز يصفون تحويلات البتكوين على انها سرية ومخفية لانه هدا غير صحيح تماما, في الواقع تحويلات البتكوين هي الاقل خصوصية على وجه الكرة الارضية, فكل تحويل يتم على الشبكة يمكن معرفته من قبل 7 مليار شخص (باستتناء الاطفال الرضع طبعا   ), هدا الجانب ساهم كثيرا في عدم محاربة البتكوين من قبل الحكومات, فلقد تمكنو فعلا من انشاء برامج متطورة لمراقبة البلوكتشين وتتبع الاصول والتحويلات ولا يبدو انهم قلقين من البلوكتشين في حالتها الاصلية.

باستخدام شبكة البرق, تبدا المشكلة او الحل, لان التحويلات التي تتم داخل ال payment channel لايتم نشرها على البلوك تشين, ولا احد يعرف لماذا تم تحويلاها وكم كانت القيم, وعند اغلاق القناة وعمل broadcact لاخر تحديث للقناة, المعلومات التي تنشر على البلوكتشين تكون ملخصة وتحتوي على الارصدة النهائية فقط, ونظرا لانه يمكن عمل route للتحويلات قد تكون هناك قيمة تحركت 1000 مرة بين 1000 قناة وكل هده التحركات سوف تختفي ولن تظهر على البلوك تشين.

المنصات الكبيرة تحاول بشتى الطرق الابتعاد عن المشاكل, وهي مجبرة ان تطبق قوانين ولوائح غسيل الاموال ومكافحة الارهاب, في حال دعمها لشبكة البرق فقط تدخل في المنطقة الرمادية وتعرض نفسها للمشاكل, لذلك من الصعب جدا ان تبدا المنصات في التعامل الكامل بشبكة البرق.

الجزء الاخر من هده النقطة انه و على عكس التحويلات التي تجري على البلوكتشين الرئيسي فأنك حتى ولو كنت تقوم ب routing فأنت فعليا تقوم بالتحويل بالنيابة عن الشخص الاخر, مثلا

لنتخيل السيناريو الاتي:


احمد يتملك قناة دفع مفتوحة بينه وبين محمد, ومحمد يتملك قناة دفع مفتوحة بينه وبين علي, لنتخيل ان احمد يريد تحويل مبلغ معين لي علي, طبعا في هده الحال ليس من المنطقي ان يقوم علي واحمد بفتح قناة جديدة بينهم, يمكنهم استخدام قناة محمد , ففي هده الحالة يقوم احمد بتحويل المبلغ + الرسوم لي محمد الذي يقوم بدوره بتحويل اخر بينه وبين علي, في هده الحالة يتحصل علي على بتكوين من محمد بالرغم من ان التحويل جاء من احمد ل علي الا ان محمد في هده الحالة هوا من قام بالتحويل.

الان يمكنك تخيل ماذا سيحدث لمحمد في حال ان علي كان شخص ارهابي مثلا وتم اكتشاف انه قام بتحويل الاموال له, ايضا المشكلة الاخرى انه في هده الحالة سوف يتم تصنيف نشاط محمد على انه "خدمة تحويل اموال" وهده في كثير من الدول تعتبر غير قانونية ويتوجب عليك الحصول على رخصة لمزوالة مثل هده الانشطة.

فكل هده التعقيدات القانونية تشكل عائق امام شبكة البرق, واعتقد ان اغلب المنصات والشركات يتنظرون توضيح هده الامور من قبل المشرعين خصوصا في الولايات المتحدة, الشخص العادي يريد ان يعرف ماهو مصيره في حال امتلاك عقدة في شبكة البرق, هل عليه دفع ضرائب على عمولات التحويل التي يتحصل عليها؟ هل يخالف القانون بتحويله للاموال من شخص أ الى شخص ب؟ ربما لايكون الامر بهده الخطورة ولكن معظم الناس لا تحب التواجد في المناطق الرمادية.


2- الحاجة لاستخدام شبكة البرق:

هده النقطة اهم بكثير من النقطة الاولى, فلو كانت الحاجة ملحة لاستخدام شبكة البرق لفقدت النقطة الاولى الكثير من اهميتها, شخصيا اعتقد اننا في هده المرحلة لا نحتاج لشبكة البرق بطريقة ملحة وضرورية, البتكوين في السنوات الاخيرة تحول من اداة للدفع الى اصل استثماري, ولو قمت بالاطلاع على on-chain data ستجد ان معظم المحافظ لم تقم باي تحويل من سنوات, لايوجد عدد كافي من الناس يريدون ان يشترو قهوة او كيلو طماطم باستخدام البتكوين.

يرجع هدا لقاعدة اقتصادية موجودة منذ القدم, وهي ان "العملة الردئية تطرد العملة الجيدة من التداول", ولفهم هدا المثال, تخيل معي الاتي, تخيل انك تمتلك 10$ من الكاش في جيبك, وفي مقابلها بتكوين بنفس القيمة, تم دخلت للسوق واشتريت بضاعة ب 10$, وكان امامك الخيار اما ان تدفع بالبتكوين (حتى ولو كان بدون رسوم) ام تدفع كاش او باستخدام بطاقة المصرف؟ من المنطقي جدا ان تكون اجابتك هي الدفع ب 10$ لانك على الاغلب تؤمن بأن 10$ البتكوين بعد عامين ممكن ان تصبح 50$ بينما ال 10$ التي في جيبك لن تشتري لك نفس البضاعة بعد يومين!

هدا التحول الجدري في مضمون البتكوين وانتقالها من نظام peer to peer E-cash system  الى شي يشابه الذهب يسعى الجميع لامتلاكه وتخزينه, غير مدى الحاجة للحلول التي توفرها شبكة البرق, فمثلا لشخص عادي مثلي لايريد شراء المواد الغدائية بالبتكوين, فتحويلاتي للبتكوين محدودة جدا, اشتغل واوفر مبلغ ما بعد كم شهر, اقوم بتحويل ذلك المبلغ لبتكوين, يمكن بعد 3-4 سنوات يرتفع السعر واقرر البيع, اقوم بتحويل اخر, كل هده الاجرائات لا تكلفني 1$ وحتى وان كلفت 10$ فهدا لايهم لانني لن اقوم بتكراره كل يوم, لماذا اوجع راسي بشبكة البرق من الاساس؟

كل هدا يتغير في حال غير الناس نضرتهم للبتكوين, ويتم معاملته على انه عملة تحافظ على قيمتها وليس عملة تزداد قيمتها كل سنة, عندها سترجع البتكوين للتداول اليومي, ولن يكون layer 1 قادر على تغطية ملاين التحويلات وعندها سوف نكون مجبرين على استخدام الحلول الاخرى وعلى رأسها شبكة البرق.

اعتقد انه يمكن الجزم ان 90% من الاختراقات يكون المسبب الرئيسي فها هوا المستخدم كون ان اختراق خوادم المنصات او غيرها من المواقع في العادة امر شبه مستحيل, ان استغرب صراحا من بعض الناس الذين لا يمارسون اي نوع من التأمين على اموالهم, فتجد شخص يستعمل محفظة ويندوز على نفس الكومبيوتر الذي يستخدمه للالعاب والتصفح وتزيل البرامج المكركة وقد يكون عبارة عن لابتوب يتجول به في المولات والمقاهي ويستخدم اي شبكة واي فاي يجدها!

ايضا البعض الاخر يستعمل محفظة على الموبايل ويستخدم المبوبايل لكل الاغراض, ويكون برنامج المصادقة موجود على نفس الموبايل الذي يستخدمه لدخول المنصة, او يضع شريحة الاتصال في نفس التلفون!!

كل هده التصرفات تجعلك عرضة للاختراق بطريقة او باخرى, شخصيا وفيما يتعلق بحماية حسابي على المنصات لا اقوم باستخدام الحاسوب للدخول للمنصة, برنامج المنصة موجود في موبايل خاص لا استخدمه لاغراض اخرى, وبطاقة ال sim التي استخدمها للمصادقة موجودة في هاتف قديم غير ذكي لا يمكنه حتى الاتصال بالانترنت, ومع كل هدا ففي كل مرة اقوم باستخدام المنصة اكون متردد واراجع نفسي ان كنت قد تركت اي مجال لاي شخص!

الحرص لا يكلف شيء.

I skimmed through the kernel log and there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary, when reading kernel logs you want to pay attention to the following:


1- Fan errors:

They usually appear in the first few lines of the kernel log, your fans passed the test and they are within the required RPMs.

2- Voltage related errors:

This happens after the fan check when the miner starts to test the voltage coming in from the PSU going to the hashboard which usually indicates a bad PSU, yours shows no voltage-related errors.

3-ASIC count:

This is the most important and most issues happen here, you need to know how many chips each of the hashboards has, either by doing a google search or comparing the count with a good board, yours reads 126 chips on each of the three hash boards which means great news.


4- Hashrate:

If you are a lazy person and don't want to deal with the 3 points mentioned above, in most new miners the kernel log will display the average hashrate, if it's within -+5% of what's mentioned on the miner's box, it usually indicates that step 1,2 and 3 have passed.


** On certain miners like the 17 series which doesn't allow you to mix and match hashboards from different miners, there would be an extra step to check which usually has the following keyoards in the error "eeprom, voltage, code" it's different from one firmware to another but it's could be easily found if you know what to look for.

Using custom firmware my miners run cooler at the same hashrate and consume less power, the auto-tuning per chip allows such a thing to happen, while on stock firmware the best you can do is find some stock version that might allow you to change the voltage and/or frequency of each board alone which doesn't bring the miner efficiency nearly as close, just a random example would be S9s running at anywhere between 70-75w per TH which you can't possibly achieve without tuning every chip differently.

You can even have two different profiles to switch between automatically during day/night, this is very helpful for people who pay different power rates at different times of the day, or for fall/spring seasons when it's warm around noon only, on S9 I can set 14TH mode from 6PM to 12PM and 12TH for 12PM to 6PM , both modes will be more efficient than the stock.

The auto-tuning and profile switching is something I personally use which is why I talked about them in detail, the rest of the features such as immersion cooling, overclocking, full SSH access, and whatnot can be found on that custom firmware webpage.

I also can't tell why other people use custom firmware, but I'd assume most of them do it for the same reason, I'd imagine that by now most people who still run S9 or any of the 17 series probably run it on custom firmware since the stock settings are not profitable for most power rates out there.

With stock firmware, if you leave one dead hash board on the miner it will cause issues such as rebooting, taking forever to boot as it has to test to the dead board a dozen times, it's even worse on Whatsminer as you can't just unplug a power cable and you are forced to take the bad hash board out of the miner which messes with the airflow, some custom firmware have the option to programmatically disable the bad hash board so the miner will treat it as "unplugged", I had a long conversion with Whatsminer's support admin regarding this, and despite the fact, that people report this issue to them all the time, they still did not solve it yet!.

The lack of features isn't just Bitmain's issue, even Whatsminer's firmware is pretty basic, it's somehow better than Bitmain, but you can only run the miner on 3 modes, high, normal, and low, the low is just TOO low, so for M20s you go from 68th to 40 something TH, and for the high, you go from 68th to probably 80 something, so you have a total of 3 profiles to choose from, which is why I decide to let my Whatsminers run a bit hot during the summer because I can't afford to lose nearly 40% of the hashrate, I could really use a profile that sets the miner at 10% less hashrate, anywhere around 55th for M20s or 45th for M21s would really do me good in the summer and around noon for except for winter season.

But well!, they don't want to bother with that, so when and if someone makes custom firmware for Whatsminer, I would certainly want to use it.

Stock firmware doesn't even allow you to change the fan settings, let alone do something else with your miner.

Personally, I use AwesomeMiner distribution of Vnish, I can either pay 1.8% and still have to buy AwesomeMiner license or pay 2.8% and get AwesomeMiner for free, I have already bought a license for 200 miners, which I can run at 1.8% and the rest I pay 2.8% fees including license, if the stock firmware allowed me to do the things I can do with this custom firmware, I would most certainly want to keep the fees, but until that happens, I'll continue to use custom firmware.

It is perfectly usual for some miners to work fine on x firmware version but work unstable or don't work at all on y firmware version, I even wrote a topic on this subject regarding S9s and how I managed to bring some dead boards back to life, I went back and forth between different stock firmware versions and the results did not change, (for some weird reason which I can't seem to figure out since 2018 lol) some boards just don't like some firmware versions.

So it's a great idea to try and install different firmware versions on your dead miners, I had some that won't run with any of the stock versions but did just fine with custom firmware, so always try a few of the 2016-2017 stock versions and 1-2 custom firmware before declaring a miner as 'dead'.

How so does the landing works exactly? you lend me x amount of money using my mining gears as collateral? and then if difficulty goes up or bitcoin prices go down (or both which is even worse) I get a margin call and pass you all my miners? if it's not my miners that you want to accept as collateral then what else do I have to offer you? I don't seem to get the logic here, perhaps someone can enlighten me.

It's all about the 'consumers', the backbone of mining pools is the miners' owners, as a pool operator you would want to attract as many miners as possible, maybe at some point miners might want to get involved in the blockchain making by actually including certain transactions (maybe those transactions blocked by certain governments), or they want more privacy (encryption) or any other feature that Stratum V2 offers, and given that Slush pool has already implement it, it gives them a headstart and my guess is -- most other pools will follow it.

manufacturers are a different story, look at Bitmain after all these years, a few devs managed to create A LOT better firmware versions and Bitmain did not bother to improve their old shit, and given that compensation is almost nonexistent I honestly don't know what would be the spark for Bitmain and their rivals.

The same goes for IPv6, both of these improvements are not urgently needed and thus people are not rushing to use them, so you are right, Stratum V2 could very well be the next IPv6 for a good while.

لا يجب ان يكون البنك يدعم البتكوين للشراء عن طريقه فالكتير من الاشخاص يقبلون تحويل بنكي لحساب معين ويرسلو لك بتكوين في المقابل, اما بالنسبة لصاحب هدا المنشور فعلى الاغلب فهي محاولة فاشلة للنصب لا اكثر, بالاطلاع على بروفايله وعلى طريقته سرده للموضوع فأعتقد انه يمككنا القول بدون شك ان هدا الشخض نصاب حتى يتبث العكس, شراء الكريبتو عن طريق حوالة بنكية يعتبر خطير جدا ومن السداجة ان يقوم اي شخص بتحويل مبلغ مالي لحساب مصرف يملكه شخص لا يعرفه!

Also this


If the internet gets cut off, miners can use other means of communication, like airwaves, for instance, light turn-off is also somewhat solvable, so none of that would totally cause the ecosystem to collapse, the only thing that could destroy it is "absolute lack of incentives", one can interpret that statement in different ways but I think we can all get to the same conclusion.
'

It was 3.4%, not bad, it seems like we are slowing down a little, large players will eventually run out of space and gears, not sure when i think pretty close.

The risk comes when the room temperature or air circulation changes for whatever reason and the miner gets to the point where it needs the fans to be spin at say 5krpm but then the "untested" fans can't perform which will cause the miner to overheat.

If you control all those variables and you are pretty sure the miner won't need high fan RPM then that is a different story and the risk does not apply much.