If they launch an investigation and they are able to correlate your bitcoin address to you as an individual, then yes you may get in trouble. This probably depends on country. Doesn't mean i agree with it, it is nonsense in my opinion, but the risk exists, and its not impossible to hide it either, if you do it right.

To begin with, you could argue where this money is in the first place. If you travel to random foreign country, and earn money and you leave it all there, how come your country back home has to collect taxes on it?

With bitcoin its even more fun, because its not in any country, but in all of them at the same time. There is no crossing borders with Bitcoin, and yet it is actually crossing all borders all the time. That's what the nodes do with the blockchain...

Simply put, the old laws do not fit. If the gov insists to tax, they should stick to sales vat such. You could have made a cold wallet a decade ago, not even in your country of origin, or bought a gold ingot and left it there nobody knows about it.

Just because you can attempt to regulate bitcoin doesn't mean its good or it will work. It does cause problems, serious privacy issues, which criminals love to exploit.

I think this matter is far from finished, and i hope with time, newer generations of politicians understand this and lift the restrictions the guys with the old mindset are trying to impose.

To clarify, you do not need to use the bos-toolbox to uninstall it. There is no locking whatsoever (or signature checks to lock you in). Obviously, Braiins OS is not modded firmware so you just can't directly use the file to flash from the miner's web ui like you would to upgrade factory firmware because its incompatible. You CAN use the sd card recovery method from Bitmain OR the bos-toolbox to go back to factory firmware just fine, then flash/upgrade that from the miner ui to whatever using Bitmain's upgrade files from their support section.

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Also mikeywith messing with the firmware of your miner is not something "the average joe" should be doing in the first place. Its not difficult but not something a computer illiterate should be messing with, kinda like rooting your phone, you could just brick it. Consider that to install it you would have also used the same command line tool or sd card in the first place, so at this point you are already beyond this.

Only few S9s with firmware from 2018 or earlier (unlocked ssh) can be directly upgraded "easily" from the miner web ui, and those are becoming rare. Just don't expect that exact same path to go back. The dev fee is clearly shown in the Braiins web site so you are already agreeing before download (its 2% for S9s, 2.5% the others). The efficiency increase greatly offsets this small fee, but the choice is yours, Also subtract slushpool's 2% fee when you use Braiins OS+ with it.

If you use the sd card you can test it without installing it. Don't like it? take out the sd card, done. There is no need to ever install it the nand can keep the factory firmware untouched. Which other firmware lets you test it this way? All of them write to the nand, but with Braiins OS this is completely optional. Also when other firmware messes your nand (or eeprom data), guess which one can work right away? You guess it, the only one that is not a mod of someone else's work.

This gratuitous bashing of Braiins OS from a competitor clearly shows something is being done right.

You got it backwards. He and another guy made paypal in a garage, this was an app (program) for palm (pda) devices (precursor to smartphones), ie: "PAY with your PALm" (basically using email and credit card). They were bought, (that's how he made his initial fortune) and from that acquisition comes the company you know today, he didn't stay there.

At this point most people would just sit in their fortune and live of it for the rest of their lives. This guy had another idea, the rest is history. But yeah, he might have seen Bitcoin from the sidelines, but truly, with the whole bunch of things he was doing he probably didn't give it any serious attention. But i guess its never late than never, he might have finally found out, perhaps because of those annoying scammers impersonating him? Who knows...

Well he probably was busy playing with rockets and cars, but i guess he finally got it. Next step in proving support, is accepting bitcoin and paying wages in bitcoin. Time will tell how genuine he is.

This is obviously false. Certain someone doesn't like people using proper firmware which doesn't infringe the gpl, or corrupt hashboard eeproms because they can't be bothered to write their own code.

If you can't read a couple of lines or ask a simple question in the group you spend all day lurking, go use the sd image from Bitmain. Too bad, you'll need to read there how to use it.

Correcto, la minería en Venezuela no puede calificarse de otra forma que hostil. Lejos de atraer capital lo ahuyentan con sus restricciones excesivas y esa burocracia es caldo de cultivo para la corrupción, extorsión y hasta secuestro. El "modelo" económico de los que gobiernan sencillamente es incompatible con el desarrollo.

Locha dice adiós antes de terminar sus equipos para enviar bitcoin sin internet


Esta gente desde un comienzo fueron muy turbios, y se los dije en su cara a ese par de joyitas, captaron un montón de dinero haciéndose pasar como "ayuda para Venezuela", ni siquiera viven acá. No les gustó, por supuesto recurrieron a las amenazas infantiles, y finalmente ya sabemos porqué.

Resultó ser otra estafa.

Algo hicieron, algo sin sentido, que presentaban como la gran "solución" para un problema que nadie había pedido, y lo vendían como la gran cosa. Desde la idea estaba obsoleto, radios de muy baja velocidad, esas radios (que no se consiguen en el país) ya tienen su software para transmitir datos y ellos plantearon reemplazarlo, cosa que en principio no tiene nada de malo, excepto que de alguna forma estaban por algún motivo inexplicable, involucrando a Bitcoin y Monero. Ahí es donde les vi lo turbio.

Bitcoin y Monero ya corren en cualquier red de datos, especialmente las que son mesh de verdad como las que existen para wifi, con mucha mayor velocidad y alcance, demostrado en la propia Venezuela hace años por cierto. Entonces estaba muy sospechosa esa solicitud de pedir donaciones y hacer una pre-venta.

Y finalmente se confirmó lo que temía.

42 es la respuesta. ¿Cual era la pregunta? ¿Cuando volveremos a ver un nuevo ATH? la última vez tomó, 3 años...

Todavía no existe el "pool nacional" pero las reglas vigentes estipulan que no se puede tener mineros sin estar en hospedajes autorizados.

Obviamente esto ilegalizó a la mayoría de los mineros de la noche a la mañana, y las detenciones e incautaciones de equipos no se han hecho esperar.

Por supuesto estas nuevas "reglas" tomadas "en consenso" entre unos pocos empresarios favorecen mucho a estos grandes "hospedadores".

Las grandes ballenas no han tenido problemas en tramitar la numerosa y costosa cantidad de nuevos permisos (licencias) que ahora exigen.

Se mantiene el indebido proteccionismo parasitario de medio siglo por parte del Estado a unos pocos "empresarios" que se irían a la quiebra sin estos privilegios.


Resumen: El pequeño minero no tiene camino para legalizarse, el sistema está hecho solo para las ballenas ligadas al poder.

If this is Braiins OS one very common mistake newbies make is assuming that booting the sd card "flashes" the firmware. No, it doesn't, if you remove the card without logging to the miner and using the flash to NAND option, its never flashes. The point is you can use it from sd without ever flashing it to the miner for testing purposes or if the NAND is damaged. Works the same except no self-updates.

The other common mistake is, believe it or not, not clearing the browser cache or trying a different browser. The likes of Chrome are annoyingly persistent with their now stale cache data from the earlier firmware.

Also, very often the ip address changes, and you have to find it again, either from your router or using a tool such as Angry IP or nmap. No, Bitmain scanning tool doesn't work.

Bitmain recommends using less than 16gb micro sd cards. This roughly tell us they are not using sdxc capable chips and can read sdhc at best. But in my experience, it is best to stick to plain old sd, which means under 2gb. Often 4gb, 8gb or such work, but its best to go as small as you can, and sometimes just changing the brand of sd makes the difference. You can thank Bitmain (or Xilinx?) for that, they don't use laptop quality microsd "tf" reading.

If it doesn't boot no big deal, flash another sd card and try again.

PS: You have to flash the .img file into the micro sd card using a tool like Balena Etcher, Rufus or dd.

Correct, the binaries were taken down as various windows tools decided to falsely flag them. You can get them from telegram but its best to stick to the Linux binaries (windows 10 can easily install Ubuntu wsl which for the common user its just a better cmd).

Open "Ubuntu" and use the toolbox as follows:

wget https://feeds.braiins-os.com/toolbox/latest/bos-toolbox
chmod +x bos-toolbox
./bos-toolbox install -p root ipa.ddr.ess

You may need to replace the password root with admin. And instead of the ip address, you can use a text file containing a list of ip addresses, one per line.


Or use the micro sd card test/install method, which is currently required for S17s and T17s anyway.

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Let me tell you something interesting. Unlike some other firmware, Braiins OS does NOT write to the eeprom of the hashboards. Should a bug, or a power failure occur during this, you may end with an apparently unusable miner, as certain firmware mods are known to corrupt the eeprom when writing their "tuning values".

The autotune solution from Braiins is completely done in software by bosminer+. Also you don't want bad values in the eeproms when running those firmware, it may tell it to use nasty values prematurely ending your hashboard life. Thankfully Braiins OS (unlike others) does not use these values at all as it has its own independent implementation.

Braiins OS can still work with hashboards suffering this corruption, if at least one of the three is good, it will read the eeprom only to identify the correct miner model. There is also an option to force the model should all three be corrupted.

Braiins OS does not "repair" machines, it simply uses them in a much cleaner way, which is what you should expect when doing your own thing from scratch, rather than manufacturer modified cgminer modified again by others (and nobody publishing back their changes, violating the license of course).

Yes we know of this and its been reported and i even suggested a solution.

In the meantime, you can just set the minimum number of fans to 0.

This happens because some fans don't like getting set to like 1% speed, under certain threshold they bump to 100%. My suggestion is to add an absolute minimum value (ie. 10%). So technically its a hardware issue, but since there are many fans of different brands, even shipped like that from Bitmain, this happens to various people.

The firmware just wants to powerdown the fans when the hashboards aren't working, to reduce the noise. Ironically, to these people it does the exact opposite. Someone even joked this is the alarm to tell you your internet is down

PS: Braiins OS+ does perform a pre-heating to avoid the situation mentioned by mikeywith. You can look at it in the system log.

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Either use the sd card recovery image from Bitmain, or the bos-toolbox, ie. bos-toolbox uninstall ipaddress. Then log into the miner and "update" that firmware to the latest from Bitmain.

Once you have Braiins OS installed just inserting the sd card won't boot from it unless you edit the text file uEnv.txt and add the line sd_boot=yes. I don't think reflashing Braiins OS from sd would make any difference, what you could try is re-enabling the boards (in Miner > Configuration) and lower the powerlimit (autotuning should always be enabled).

The faster models should be more efficient at any power use (speed) than the slower models. The goal of Braiins OS+ is efficiency, for S9s the best i have seen is about 70 watts per tera hash. Lower powerlimit values (and target temperature) tend to produce better results, especially with immersion. (ie. 60° 825W).

The control boards are all mostly the same, and Braiins OS+ doesn't even care if you mix hash boards. But then you'll have like two boards at 70° and another in 85°, etc.

Depende del consumo los mineros. La última vez que hice un cálculo, con 4 paneles de 400W se alimentaba una S9, esto es 1600W. Con Braiins OS+ se puede fijar exactamente lo máximo que pueden consumir, y si respetamos el margen de seguridad del 20%, esto significa ponerles powerlimit en 1280W (80% de 1600W) y un Grid tie inverter de 2000W.

Otros equipos como las T17 necesitarían mínimo 5 paneles, para que dispongan de 1600W (80% de 2000W) y un Grid tie inverter que soporte mas de 2200W.

Increasing the supply of the USD really did help. The day the USD could finally collapse and enter the inflation spiral doesn't look too far-fetched anymore. Just remember what we have been saying all these years: Don't keep all your savings in fiat.

The only people who "lost" from buying in the previous ATH, were those that sold. If you kept your bitcoins, now you are officially in the green.

Remember this lesson.

You mention Pizza Hut "accepts" bitcoin but there is a foreign payment processor involved pushing their service to various shops.

A Panama startup from 2017 by the name of "Cryptobuyer" has been pushing their product. They are also somehow related to Dash, which they try to promote but there is not much interest. Aside some traders, people rarely ever use Bitcoin, let alone Dash or other altcoins in "daily use".



Its technically "legal" but there is even more tax for using crypto in Venezuela.

The economy of Venezuela is in ruins so this has very limited impact. Pizza is a luxury meal a family may buy once a year, and Pizza from a foreign franchise is like 10 times more expensive.

The official monthly wage is equivalent to less than 1 USD. Only rich people get to eat Pizza.

Cryptobuyer is also linked to some dubious "bitcoin foundation" that is known to collect money "in the name of poor Venezuelans" but their members don't even live here and are quick to bash anyone even remotely suggesting any accounting of their activities. Sadly the Monero community were quick to give them tens of thousands of USD in one of those fundraising that never reach.

If you are going to buy that narrative, which has the hidden intention to try and "control" Bitcoin; you might as well run your nodes as hidden service within TOR. There are many of those by the way.

In the end, the old minded people want to impose their obsolete rules to Bitcoin. Indeed, this is no different than granting that wish certain CEO of certain exchange wanted of reverting blockchain transactions (just because he got some money stolen).

Bitcoin will work the same for all or for nobody. If you have a problem with criminals, go prosecute them and leave Bitcoin alone. The State or nobody else has any business discriminating Bitcoin transactions. You should boycott anyone promoting such things.

Yes it is being worked upon, no dates yet...

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There was a release today:



Braiins OS+ 20.11 | Full release for S17+, T17, and T17+

Key points:

• Improved tuner performance for all X17 models
• A single BOS Toolbox that can be used for batch installation, configuration, etc. on any mix of S9 and X17 models
• Other minor bug fixes and feature improvements

More details: https://braiins.com/blog/development-update-braiins-os-20-11

I'm more worried the next time they get hacked, they can either siphon out funds from the exchange or vice versa. They could easily play fractional reserve there. So on a fundamental level, having an exchange own a pool or vice versa is a big no. But then again the same could be said for asic manufacturers.

And yeah, it was Jihan Wu (of all people) whom advised him to drop the idea... Maybe from that conversation the idea of having a pool came about.

The ramp is one and a half hour, on each side. The thing is it pays to your Scoring hashrate when a block is found.