So... I dont see a lotta people talking about this other than a few handful on youtube and reddit.
About the M2 Pro miner that they're selling on matchx.io.
I ended up buying one even though their customer support for answering any kind of questions is a pile of horse crap.
I have been mining for over a week.
Now with everything i am about to say i am assuming that you already know a bit about how mxc mining works.
If you would like to know more about this heres a video that explains it well : https://youtu.be/r67ZV77U-TQ
Theres been a few changes since that video was released but it explains the just of it.

Keeping all that in mind. After a bit of hands on experience with this whole thing, even though i was a bit skeptical about this from the start, things started to become a little fishy.

1. When i first bought the miner they claimed that they’ve shipped hundreds of miners to my country and shipped them using DHL. When it arrived in my country, MXC foundation had no idea about the document requirements for customs clearance so i had to manually contact them to get the documents specifically made for me to clear them.

2. When you withdraw your MXC, lets say all of it, the fuel goes back to 0. Once its 0 any new tokens you mine (now at lower efficiency) continue to increase the size of your fuel tank. So the algorithm is FuelTank = x + new mined mxc EVEN if its less than 100% full. This makes it mathematically impossible to recover 100% of your tokens by mining alone forcing you to buy mxc or top it up manually. This violates the promises they made and things they explained on discord.

3. Why not make it so your MXC wallet tokens, staked or not, work as fuel instead of a separate wallet if the whole point of this algorithm is to make people hold onto their mxc for longer periods of time?

4. I accidentally bought europe version of the m2 pro and i am in asia, there is absolutely no difference in the amount of mxc i earn.

5. They recently added BTC “mining”. While all you’re doing is, locking your MXC and getting rewarded in BTC. Thats not “mining” as they claim or is it?

On top of all this, i see almost nobody asking any questions along these lines even though these are quite obvious questions to ask when getting into a new project.
My personal opinions on this are not very good and i am leaning more towards of it being a scam. I will most likely keep the miner running and take what i can get.

What are your thoughts?

Apparently the company that made the cloned S9 hash boards almost doubled the hashrate on them. However that means there would either have to be more chips on board or they essentially overclocked a board, which would mean that modifications would need to be made to the firmware and to the microcontroller on the hash board. The companies which produce cloned FPGA board clones (like arduino clones) usually tend to use a slightly different version of the ram chips or some other chip on board which then they can sell for a profit.

Having a trace somewhere that is slightly longer wouldnt effect things too much as far as i know. Damaged traces or vias could cause problems but in most cases, any problems to those mean that theres not gonna be a continuity through the board at all to begin with.
Now of course there are different guages of traces that can be used on PCBs and the thicker the guage the more the resistance but then the difference would be so small if any that it would be unnoticeable.

Making a one to one copy of the hash board like i suggested/plan on doing shouldnt have any considerable difference in the hashrate or efficiency, provided that the PCB used matches the appropriate ratings for the amount of heat and current that is going to be passed through it because, in the end, its the control board thats in charge of making sure that the chips are running at their required potential and giving out the required hashrate.

Its obvious that the custom made hash boards wont hold as much value as the original hash boards if you're trying to sell them. Because essentially what you're doing is substituting the physical labor, time and effort that you are going to put into assembling the thing to save yourself some cash which you would need to buy a new hash board (in my case anyway, but i am sure it was the same for that company). I wouldnt even be surprised if a company started selling custom made hash boards for more than what the original ones cost because in the end they had to spend more time modifying the board (which would be a terrible decision but it happens).

If you thought i was making this post because i wanted to mass produce cloned hash boards and sell them for a profit because i claim to be able to produce them for cheap, then no, thats far from what i meant. I am aware thats not going to be at all profitable and moreover theres always a legal caveat to the story (which is why the companies tend to "modify" their clones instead of making a copy). I was more of planning to get back the ROI from the boards themselves by using them, if they worked of course.

However mass producing and selling custom made hash boards is gonna be way less profitable than making a few of them for yourself to use for mining (which the companies are doing as well like i said before) because, as you said, people would rather go for the original ones or even an original different miner alltogether from a trusted source since the price isnt gonna be much more different.

As for the custom firmware, it was most likely because they produced a modified version of the hash board to run on the control board for the S9. I am pretty certain that making a one to one clone of a board will not require a custom firmware to be flashed on the control board and it should just work because every single bit of data is freely accessible on the microcontroller.

Moreover, coincidentally enough, i was contacted by a chinese company to analyze the firmware on the control board for an s17 back in 2019, i was able to get to the linux shell on it in about two hours. Since then there have been a few writeups on this (not by me), one of which can be found here : https://hackaday.com/2020/12/10/a-xilinx-zynq-linux-fpga-board-for-under-20-the-windfall-of-decommissioned-crypto-mining/

I agree with that one, hidden costs could and do usually come up at any point in time that i dont know of since the price is always fluctuating.

The reason i am confident and almost a little too confident about this is because i've worked on repairing asic miners and particularly the control and hash boards for a long time, i essentially built two hash boards by parts for an s17 pro that was struck by lightning where i used the chips and microcontroller from one and the pcb from another and sourced the other components on the internet, this is how i am certain that they are not hardware locked. This is essentially the exact same thing with the difference that the pcb is required to be manufactured rather than sourced from a different miner and i'd have to manually copy over the data on the microcontroller.

But this, indeed, is quite an expensive endeavour so i definitely should try it out with an older model first. I am gonna keep searching for someone who could help me copy the PCB in the meantime and i'll update this if i find any useful information on it. Thanks!

I respect your opinions but i just simply disagree with most of what you said. Some of your opinions seem to be dependant on more of a "what can/would" instead of "what is"  while the others are flat out contradicting my research without a valid reason.
I asked the sellers to make me an invoice along with shipping and handling and i am literally able to purchase the chips for $10 to $14 depending on the quantity with around $30 shipping (not including customs and handling).
They offer to send you a paid sample ($25) after your order is booked to make sure of the authenticity of the chip before making the full payment.

No ones talking about cloning an s19 pro miner, this is about cloning the main PCB thats found in that miner. As for the time and soldering of the chips on the board, i am a software developer and i do hardware repairing job as a hobby on the side and hold over 6 years of experience. I can easily get access to BGA rework stations if need be. As stated before, getting 3 hash boards with 342 chips ready would take me no longer than around a day or two provided that i have a good PCB, excluding the hours it takes to reprogram the microcontroller.

As for everyone making their own cars and Phones. Think of it as replacing the wheels of an already intact car with aftermarket ones and replacing the memory chip of a new phone with a different one of another phone of the same make-model, and yes, i am not talking outta my ass on this one, this is actually being done for iphones nowadays but thats besides the point.

You clearly dont have your research on the parts market and your statements simply state, "this will not work because... no" or, "because... economy" instead of a good explanation as to why while every bit of information i have shared can be traced back and confirmed at least at the time of writing this post, if you do your research.
The resellers are selling the machines at such high profit margins that assembling it from parts has become cheaper.

Now of course all this is theoretical and its hard to say for certain without knowing the cost of cloning the pcb and the shipping costs might fluctuate a bit, but right now at the time of writing this post i, and even you can purchase EVERY SINGLE thing you need to assemble a working S19 Pro miner including shipping OTHER THAN the hashboard PCB for (and yes i have calculated this after getting in stock ready to ship part quotations from sellers) : $5890

The lowest price on a S19 Pro IF in stock that i could find in my three hour long parts hunt on alibaba is $14800 and that does not include shipping.

Now i expect you to, yet again, "highly doubt" this. But i have no reason to flat out lie on a public forum while the prices are out there on the internet for everyone to see and find out.

Would really appreciate if you at least read the whole thread before jumping to conclusions, you clearly half assed through the convo before writing your response and have no clue what the post is about.
And moreover 114*3*20 = 6840 rather than 8640

My whole point of writing the post was the fact that i personally know someone and i can maybe get my hands on at least some chips for near cost price and the fact that assembling the miner on your own from parts is somehow costing much much less than what its going for. (assuming that cost of cloning a pcb isnt astronomically high which i am certain its not)
Moreover that aside, checking with other sellers on alibaba at the time of writing this message, the chips are going for around $10 to $14 maximum, dont have to take my word for it, you could inquire with alibaba sellers yourself.

114*10*3 = 3420
add around 200 for the control board and 250 to 280 for a psu.
There is a microcontroller, some SMD components, some electrolytic capasitors and an inductor on the board, all of which can be arranged for no more than $50 to $100.
The peripherals including the fans and wiring cost no more than $100.
The rest depends on the cost of cloning the PCB .

Give or take $1k on the whole total, you are still looking at less than half the price of what the miner is going for and there is NO possible way you're ever going to reach that amount of money if something like this ends up working (14 to 15k).

Now am i saying that everything is going to be 100% genuine and is going to work on the first try?
No, nothing is certain, it might even end up being a total waste of time and money.
But then, that goes for the whole crypto scene/market alltogether anyway.

As for the market not getting flooded with no-name miners, if the company is able to self-assemble the miner at less than half the amount of what it costs then the ROI is so quick that its not worth the risk to lose money by putting it up on the market. Moreover companies know that if they decide to put it up on the market they would need to claim the product to be their own and bitmain is a closed source project plus it would lower the ASIC miner sales and that poses the risk of getting sued by bitmain and/or quite possibly a supply cut off of chips and miners from them for that company. The distributor companies who do these things tend to work along with bitmain rather than working against them.
There are numerous other companies who claim to be producing/manufacturing ASIC miners but refuse to put them up for sale.

All i am saying is that, In theory there is no reason why it wouldnt work and i might put some funds into this in the coming months and it would be great if someone with pcb manufacturing ability is willing to help.

The chips are running in parallel to one another, if the temperature on any of the chips goes above 85C (185F), the chip stops functioning until its cooled back down to around 60C (140F) by the continuously running fans which ramp up upon a surge in temperature.
Now even though the thermals are well managed by software alone, i am sure manufacturing the PCB would require some specific things to be taken care of but, then again, thats where my knowledge of PCBs end and thats exactly what i need help with.
My point by the above statement was assuming that if we have a properly cloned PCB, slapping on the components isnt really too hard of a task.

Now as for the cost of cloning the pcb correctly and also the claims of alibaba sellers saying they are able to clone any pcbs for cheap if you ship one to them, i am in the dark.
But what i do know for sure, and i am sure you'd agree, is that its still not going to cost anywhere close to $10k.

The PSU can supply a max of 12-15V 233A to the hash board while it only supplies 12.3V 15A to the control board as seen from the datasheet of the PSU on bitmain's website linked below :
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020210302152412332Xrq3G3E60644

As for the mounting of all the components, they are cheap and available to buy from any component website or even alibaba including the main hashing chips and all other ICs as i stated before. The board has at most 5 kinds of different components on it other than the main hashing chips, tracking those exact components down is a piece of cake.
For someone with a tiny bit of experience with BGA and SMD components, getting a hash board ready would take no longer than an hour.

This, however does come with a caveat. The boards do have a microcontroller on them if i remember correctly to communicate with the control board. (i'll update with the exact controller model once i get the chance). But the data pins on the controller are freely accessible on the board itself (they soldered on a connector for it XD). Copying over the code from the controller to another should not be a hard task at all.

The control board and the hash board require separate voltages. In my opinion the best bet would be to spend the $300 to get an actual PSU thats meant to work with the miner. This then means that the only component thats not factory is the hash boards (and the fans). The hash boards simply have some SMD diodes for reverse current protection and some capacitors along with the BM1398BB chips.

Now speaking from experience, i've replaced hashing chips on antminer s17 pro in the past and they tend to work normally, the hash board does not look much different than s17 pro's hash board so i am pretty certain that the chips themselves are not tied to the control board in any way. Moreover even if they were, the chips are going to be from bitmain themselves so with a little bit of luck, they should end up working.

If someone manages to help with copying a hash board pcb for cheap then we're basically looking at an s19 pro for around $2000 if not cheaper, with added work of soldering the BGA chips and the SMD components on the board of course.
Alibaba does have services where you can send in a pcb and they'll clone it for you for cheap (again, pcb = just the board no components on it). But i sadly dont have a board i can sacrifice, hell there isnt even a proper image of the board on google yet -_-

Ah then to jerry rig something together one would need two power supplies with the outputs as mentioned in the link below, one to power the chips and the other one to power the control board.
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020210302152412332Xrq3G3E60644

Still, not outta the equation considering that the variable output power supplies are going for quite cheap on chinese websites.
The main chips receive around 12-15v at 233A apparently and the control board is 12.3V at 15A (i think)

Now that i think about it, the control board is supposed to communicate with the power supply through a separate ribbon cable, most likely to shut off a board in case of abnormal hashrate or a surge in current. I will ask about how they power their oil cooled miners in their company and update the main post once i get the info.

Thankfully the power supply is not that hard to reverse engineer either and the control chip is most likely available to buy just like all the other chips, i'll take a look at my psu and see if i find anything as well.

Edit :
After taking another close look at the back of the psu,
The power supply uses a micron pic16f1704-I/SL microcontroller to communicate with the control board and uses a few other ICs for protection such as ix4340n.
The fans get direct input from the transformers so the fan speed on the power supply is not variable.
Now the microcontroller is programmable and the pinouts are conveniently available to access on the psu.
this micron IC manages the voltage regulation and also helps with the "sleep" feature that s19 pro has.


Now talking to my friend again i learned that their company buys as many PSU's they can from bitmain since they're relitively cheap but then they also have a third party manufacturer who makes these PSU's for them.
The PSU's, original or aftermarket, are going from anywhere between $240 to $300 at the time of writing this. which, then again, is not out of the equation considering the price of the whole unit.

Hi there!
Recently i bought two S19 Pros and ended up blowing the PSU on one of them which lead me to open it up and replace some mosfets to fix it.
While i was at it i decided to give the rest of the miner a clean so i dove in and began doing that. While in the process of cleaning i took a note of the components inside on the main hash boards and the control board.

I have a friend in china who used to be a business partner of my cousin and she now works for a ASIC miner distributor company via alibaba. I got in touch with her to talk about the making of these machines to get some more insight.
Now in the two hour long conversation i learned quite a bit about it and i will be sharing a few of the things i learned.

The reason its almost impossible to buy miners straight from bitmain or other mining companies is because they look for high profits rather than customer satisfaction, there are underground bids which take place between large distributors and the highest bidding company gets the cake. This happens weeks before the miners are released on their website for purchase.

Cutting to the chase. The distributor company that my friend works in used to be a PCB manufacturing company. They buy BM1398BB hashing chips straight from bitmain and manufacture their own hashing pcb's by cloning one of the original ones and end up oil cooling them. Now to me, all of it makes sense since all an ASIC miner has is a control board, a power supply and a few hashing boards. None of the components are tied to one another when it comes to the hardware.

Now while its possible to clone the control board and the information on it is as follows, it looks like its quite a tedious task considering that the actual board is quite cheap to buy straight from bitmain.
CPU :  XC7Z007S-1CLG225C
DRAM : M15T2G16128A (2L)
NAND Flash Memory : MT29F2G08ABAEAWP 2GB
Network Chip : PPT PM44-11BP
The linux based firmware that is stored on the flash memory is later witten to the DRAM at runtime and is available to download on bitmain's website and can be flashed using the sd card slot on the control board.

Anyhoo, oil cooling being a whole different story, I was told that each hashing chip costs about $2 and some select few companies can hook you up with the original ones. Which leaves me with needing a control board which costs around $200 and wiring which costs around $50 including the power cords which are not included with the power supply or miner purchase. A generic 12v 20a power supply that s19 pro needs costs a mere $60 where i live. The power supply costs around $240 to $300.

Now of course i did not include the small components like heat sinks, housing, tax and shipping costs and such.
But in hindsight if i were to build the whole thing on my own, it would cost a considerably less amount of money considering that these machines are going for around $10,000 if not more, per unit, at the time of writing this post.

I've been interested in this since i learned about it a few months back, but i lack the ability to clone boards and funds to get access to a board.
My point of writing this post is to learn more about things that i might have missed or gotten wrong and/or to maybe try out this project with someone who thinks they can help or have experience in pcb cloning/manufacturing without a schematic and finds this interesting.

Unfortunately just about no one india buys these miners because of a few reasons.
1. They dont know about mining
2. They think it is dead and not profitable.

Now even if someone did buy these, it would be in a limited quantity for personal use and no one is going to sell a PSU off from their miner locally.
I know this because importing these miners to india from china has a very lengthy procedure that most people dont know how to follow, even bitmain official website does not ship to india because of this.

Even if someone manages to do the right paperwork and manages to find the right shipping service for it, its still going to be a hit or miss because sometimes the people at customs end up stealing the package. (unless you know how to deal with it *wink* *wink*).

The way i managed to import these miners to india is because i have some connections with the people at the customs and i simply ended up getting lucky and found the perfect seller. You can see my journey through that here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5271685.msg55085064#msg55085064

My only option is to pay the heavy shipping fees and everything and get the PSU from someone outside india.

I live in india and i have a few S19 Pros which i use to mine bitcoin.
However the electricity supply is quite poor where i live and i ended up burning out the power supply of one of the miners.
Thankfully the miner is okay when tested using a working supply and i can fix the burnt one by replacing some mosfets.
However i am not sure if it will be a lasting repair.

I am looking to buy a new PSU and i am hoping if i could get it for around $150, which i know is quite near the actual cost price on bitmain's website but i am very low on funds due to covid.
I can pay the shipping charges and everything as well.
I would be very greatful if i can get some trusted escrow suggestions and offers on this since i am quite new to this on here.

Thankyou

@Heisenberg_Hunter
Thanks for such a well put together reply!

i'll try my best to keep this as updated as i can

I would assume, and i say this by giving the benifit of the doubt to the seller, thats the exact reason the seller told me about KingTrans being safer, because according to my research the package ultimately ends up being taken care of by the India Post once it enters the country.
Also i look forward to your update!

Thanks SO SO much for this information, i'll make sure to shoot him a DM the next time i need to order something.
I wonder what the total price difference would be when using an escrow service vs ordering from alibaba (assuming all of this goes well). Because alibaba has quite a huge amount of fees while ordering a miner.
Alibaba charges 3% of the total cost from every sale made by the sellers so the sellers add that 3% in the total cost of the order. Along with that theres a huge amount of visa fees when paying through alibaba.
so i wonder how that would boil down to when compared to the escrow service fees and everything.

According to my calculations, with the electricity rate in my area of $0.07/kwh and miners mining around 220TH/s, i would be making an okay amount of profit if i receive these two.

Oh thanks for the info! i might actually wanna take a look around there.


The main issue here in my country is not the legitimacy of the miners as much as it is with the customs holding the packages and never clearing them.
The customs have been known to even dispose off the mining hardware that enters india or in rare occassions having the customer to ship the product back to the seller paying the visa fees and shipping costs all over again.

I was wondering if there are ways or lesser known courier services who ship to india and would clear the packages, KingTrans apparently being one.
Now i dont know if its legit (i asked in the off topic section about it).
But the seller i am buying this from apparently has and shared tracking numbers of customers from india who purchased miners from them in the last month.
Here is the link i was sent where i was able to track with the numbers provided.

The website looks fishy and almost fake and has whois masking and everything but looking into it a bit more, the website has decent traffic and is about 50 years old.

The seller claims that even if the package through this service takes a few more days to arrive, the people working in this service "help" you with the customs if your package gets stuck .
I am somewhat inclined towards asking the seller to ship my orders via this service rather than DHL since i am taking a risk anyway and DHL has been known to dispose off mining hardware BUT i am not quite sure about it yet.

What do you think would be my best shot to make all this work?

mocacinno : done!

jackg : well, if you see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5271685.0 you'll know half the story. Continuing on that, the package has not been shipped yet and the seller has shown me the tracking information of a customer's package through kingtrans where the customer has successfully received the item. The seller claims that these people are better than dhl at clearing the customs for you even if they take a bit longer. So since i am taking a big risk already, i'd rather go with the best shot that i've got. After doing some research on it of course 

is http://ecg.kingtrans.cn/WebTrack legit?

the website looks terrible and has whois masking
i've been told it is a courier service just like special line

easycounter.com shows that the website is 50 years old and owned by Shenzhen Yiyutong Technology Co., Ltd.


i am worried if this is owned by the seller's company himself and they add fake tracking info whenever they want to.

I've been mining crypto since 2017. By the end of that year indian government started to become a little weird about crypto mining.
Companies like bitmain have stopped shipping to india as well since according to them the customs dont let your packages through.

However when looking up more information about this, most articles and forums date back to exactly 2017 and there has not been any further discussion or information after that.

There are a lot of people trying to sell miners in india on certain websites like indiamart. 99% of those people are very obvious scammers and dont even know the details about the miners they're selling.

History aside, i was willing to take the risk and i went ahead and ordered two Antminer s19 Pro's from a seller on Alibaba. The packages are supposed to be shipped to india via DHL.
The seller willingly showed pictures of the customs clearance forms along with the tax included invoices of other people who bought miners from them in india (their personal information like phone number, address and last name was blurred out).

I will keep everyone updated as to how my experience goes, but i have a few questions to ask:

1. Has anyone recently done this sort of thing of purchasing mining hardware from alibaba? if so then how did it go and what was your procedure of doing it?
2. Do you guys think i'll be successful in this endeavour?



Edit1 : September 3rd 2020
=================

The package shipments have been delayed from bitmain due to covid, however they're providing compensation in the form of coupons and the amount of compensation is increased every 10 days after the shipment/delivery date.

I talked about KingTrans a little in my other reply below. I did some research and found out that the actual company they ship from is ecgexpress and the website is http://ecgexpress.com.
KingTrans seems to be a tracking service that other courier services use, this domain has a lot of different sub domains with the first few letters of different courier services (just like ecg.kingtrans.com).

However ecgexpress seems to be a legit website and a legit transport service.
they've got a justdial profile (which is just like yelp for people who are not in india) and they apparently transport from china to india and then deliver your product via fedex or other courier services.
i was also able to track the tracking number provided via this website https://www.17ckd.com/17ckd/5879/d.htm

The latest tracking number that i was given was on "awaiting customs payment" at the time of making this initial post
as of today the customs have cleared the package and the package is on its way to the destination via fedex.



On a side note, KingTrans also has this
This is apparently what they use to calculate the shipping costs. I was not able to make this form work though. I hope someone else can try and make it work just so i have an idea about the new shipping cost through this service.

i would appreciate if someone looks through these websites and makes sure my research is correct and on point since none of these have ssl for some odd reason.
Also if you've had an experience with this courier service before, i'd like to know how it went.


Edit2 : September 3rd 2020
=================

I called ecgexpress from the numbers provided on justdial. The conversation went very weird and it's almost making me rethink my decisions.
Heres how the conversation went.

Me : "Hey i am calling to ask about this tracking number *proceeds to speak the tracking number*.

Him : "Oh no sorry, look i am the director of ecgexpress, we used to work with another company a few years back but now we dont anymore, the tracking number you provided is from that company because my tracking numbers now start with the prefix ECG. A fraud chinese company is using our company's name."

Me: "Oh thats interesting, however your justdial profile has the website ecgexpress.com on it and this tracking number works just fine when tracking on your website. ecgexpress.com is your website right?"

Him : "oh umm, actually yeah. no my website is ecgexpress.net"

and ecgexpress.net is not even a valid website.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this.


Edit3 : September 3rd 2020
=================

I contacted the alibaba seller once again asking them to give me some kind of website or contact information about the shipping company that they'll use to send me the packages just in case i need to talk to them about custom clearance.
Heres the seller's reply, "Sorry, i only have the tracking portal of the company. However we will send your packages to our shipping agency and from there it will go to india special line. If your package has problems in the customs, someone will contact you. This is a very experienced shipping company so dont worry".


Edit4 : May 3th 2021
=================

Apologies for the delay and leaving this dead from so long, got a bit busy with family due to covid. However i got some good news to share.
I received the miners on the promised date and has to pay a very reasonable amount of money for customs. The miners have been mining since and making a good amount of profit. Overall i think i was stressing out a bit too much than i needed to but its always good to be cautious.