Topic: Be aware of fake firmware floating around. (Read 19192 times)

Hi Guys, I found some private software for mining coins, but I can't set it up correctly, can someone help? https://cutt.ly/N0ib1aj

If you don't mind dropping the efficiency to the levels of the previous generation (S17+), AND adding an expensive custom PSU, AND using expensive immersion cooling, AND you don't mind stressing your new precious Chinese investment, i guess you could actually get something closer to these:



I suppose the old "certain conditions apply" would be fitting here...

Or you could just buy two S17+... But to each their own, i guess.

OMG thanks for spreading awareness, im new in this and im trying to find every useful info about mining. Thanks. BTC

Honestly speaking, if I saw this claim from a random person - I would think they are full of shit, but Marc however isn't a random person with no development history, I had plenty of interactions with him, and the firmware which he distributes (Vnish) is a solid firmware which I personally used on hundreds of mining gears, while I don't think he is lying about it, I will be very impressed and surprised if that was true.

80% more hashrate is just way too much, it MIGHT work under severely special conditions, and maybe for a very limited time only, air-cooling will most certainly not handle anything close to that and then the PSU will be the second main problem.

With that being said, time will tell ! .. personally, I am against overclocking of any kind, if anything, I underclock the majority of my gears for the good part of the year, and leave them at default when temps are low, to me with free power, my main priority is to keep the gears running for as long as possible, but for someone else they might want to take advantage of a difficulty drop / different power rate at different times/seasons, I don't judge people who overclock their gears, I just don't do it.


That's a disturbing image that makes you want to underclock the heck out of your gears lol, I still remember when my small farm caught fire at the power panel, it was most certainly not fun to watch but to be fair, I believe most of these incidents happen mainly due to bad wiring/PSU/plugs and whatnot, more so than the overclocking effect itself, in other words, an overclocked miner with the perfect electricity setup (everything from wiring to PSU and all that) is less likely to catch fire than an underclocked miner with say loose plugs and smaller wire size than needed or a terribly build PSU.

From that thread:


I wonder if he had a setup for discharging for that water to put in or he would just be happily sprinkling and sparkling it over the fire manually

s19s to 200? From 30% on S17 they managed to get close to 100% on S19? Doubt it.

Along the lines of ^^ here is what can happen with aggressive over clocking: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMining/comments/pk7x8o/my_l3_caught_on_fire_due_to_aggressive/
Wanna bet we see more reddit posts like that if someone pushes S19's to the 200T realm?

Same as developing firmware and support miners from scratch.

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Now getting back to the topic:


Just saw this today on Telegram:



The S19 pro is rated by the manufacturer for 110TH, and the S19j pro for 104TH...

Makes perfect sense, but the same could be applied for BO, they wrote a whole firmware from scratch, which does cost both time and money, I believe it's only fair that they charge a fee for that, I don't quite understand why Kano would say


Well, obviously that's how they get their "fees", of course, it's always a question of whether or not they direct your miner for a longer period than they promise, which is why to those who really want to use custom firmware - they should at least use a trusted version and not something random from the internet.

As you know full well, running a pool is a service and guess what? Running that service costs money so yes there is a charge. Show me a pool that does not charge a fee of some sort. As you also know it is the lowest fees charged by ANY pool.

edit: let us also not forget that Kano runs 7 nodes around the planet to ensure minimum time between miners and their interaction with the BTC network, each node of course has a backup for it. Again that costs money and unlike a certain solo pool operator, Kano has never hinted at nor gotten any donations to run the pool despite currently running at a loss from our small size. Like -ck he made a fair bit of BTC in the early years so Kano paying out-of-pocket is not a real problem. Just sayin'

The 0.9% fee for main and 0.5% fee for solo when a block is found is a helluva less impact on miner income vs a continuous albeit small few % periodic diversion of hashrate from each piece of hardware running dev-fee firmware be it open or closed source.

So when you take the pool fee they are not mining for you? Clearly your pool is not 0% fee... Not like it matters anymore with that hashrate...

Only two of these are legit, and only one of these is proven to find blocks.

The legit ones are 1-Bitmain and 3-Braiins OS

The only one proven to find blocks is 1-Bitmain

The other firmware are all illegal since they violate the cgminer license.

You will also find that most of them use your miner to mine for them.
Braiins OS also does this.

You can't possibly do that, you will need a large organization with unlimited funds to achieve that, there are thousands of links that lead to fake firmware everywhere, it's even worse now than when I posted the topic, so all we can do is educate people in this regards.

Personally I only trust the following firmware:

1- Stock (Bitmain)
2- Vnish (AwoesomeMiner and asic.to)
3-Braiin OS
4-Moded firmware made by fellow member thierry4wd

There are probably other legit firmware out there but the vast majority are indeed fake.

I also purchased 30 s9's on ebay one had braiins.
However thanks for the information, I saw those links already deleted, please update about fake links, It will help beginners.

I stopped coz I was working on an S5 driver many years ago (for payment) and found issues with how they did the work generation - but the FPGA required redesigning, before you could fix it with cgminer.
In the end, what I was paid, I provided 'the BTC source' with something else that they were happy with, so that was the end of the S'X' development.
The S1/S2/S3 were all my own time (after getting miners from various people), but the S5 was a paid request.

I got kicked off the cgminer team by ck for no reason at all (other than me stating the fact that I was a better coder), so I certainly have had nothing to do with that for a long time.

Though, I did update miner.php for the S9 and recent Avalons about a year ago, and the new version is available on discord

Seems to be a lot of sketchy firmware out there for the miners these days.

Saying that having run the kano version of the S3 firmware I found it to be very good with a lot lot less load and much better HW error figures.

On another note virus total is not the best tool to use for looking at .exe's I find if you really want to dig into them and see lot's more details on what it's actually doing then https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/ is the go too tool for the ones who like a deeper peek into what's going on.

I think the reason bitmain started locking the later miners was to try combat this issue with scam firmware and try keep people on there own brand.

@kano how about a update for the S3+ firmware been some time and there still about would love latest cgminer on it

Thank you for clarifying what bitmain is doing wrong.

Bitmain didn't rip off cgminer.
Cgminer is GPL opensource.
They released many versions of the source code ... that's how I did the S1/S2/S3 driver that exists in cgminer, by taking their driver code, reformatting it, fixing lotsa bugs, then adding that better code to cgminer.

Of course they haven't been forthcoming with source code since around the time of the S9, but that's a different issue completely, due to international law ...

ck's bitching about Bitmain a couple years or so ago was all bullshit anyway.
He pissed off Bitmain at the start by ignoring them when they sent him an S1 and not doing a driver (which I did a lot later)
As the saying goes, "he dug his own grave".

In a morally correct world 🌎


1) bitmain would not have ripped off cgminer in the first place.
2) all bitmain miners would have 3 speed settings.
3) all bitmain miners would have multiple voltage settings.

If the above were true they would be almost no need for after market firmware.


That said. If you use aftermarket and point it to a solo pool you would not be hurting anyone but yourself if it is bad firmware.

If you point aftermarket at a pps+ pool you will hurt the pool if the firmware is bad.

If you point aftermarket at a pool like kano or mmpool or ckpool you hurt yourself you hurt the pool you hurt  your fellow miners.

I have about 2ph mostly pointed at viabtc all uses bitmain firmware with one exception a 7th braiins.

Damn straight it would because you have in effect cut the number of miners by the same percentage. That in turn is highly unfair to those running legit (known working OEM) firmware because pool payouts have to be shared with the miners running crap firmware. Again, I'm not saying that the various flavors of modded FW out there are crap but rather that the onus is on the devs of said FW to PROVE that they did not screw things up.

Mega pool operators may not mind too much because enough blocks are found per-day by the other miners to keep folks happy but for small pools missing blocks can be the Kiss of Death. That is the sole technical reason why Kano.is bans non-OEM firmware. Once someone provides verifiable proof their FW finds blocks at a rate which is on-par with OEM FW that would just leave GPL license violations as a moral reason to ban it.

Consider a pool with everyone on the pool running firmware that never finds a block, or 50% of the pool running it, or 25%. It will have an impact on the luck of the pool wouldn't it?