Topic: Be aware of fake firmware floating around. (Read 28576 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.

---

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?

Some pool operators need to chime in on this but AFAIK, getting shares accepted is only part of the proof. Latency between getting/sending shares, # of rejects, stales and other things have to factor in as well. Again the FUP that Slush had a couple years ago with a VERY large miner being paid $$$ for over a month of bad work caused by a screwed up proxy comes to mind.

Considering that the devs have often stated that some large farms use the modified FW it should be a piece of cake to get proof. Heck, I only run just over 1/2 PH and to-date have hit 10 blocks on Kano.is or roughly 2 per-year since I started running there. Very large farms should be popping blocks left and right and considering most run some sort of monitoring software (or damn well should be), just set it to look for the block found flag and log it.

Not that I am against proving that it works, but if it is getting accepted shares registered on pool, isn't that enough of proof? Also, imagine how much PH, time and LUCK would you need to prove that you can find a block?

Additionally, I am not sure about this 100% but I do not think they modify anything else other then frequency, voltage and fee; Someone correct me if I am wrong. But I would love for @taserz, @vnish (if he even has bitcointalk acc) @chipless and other custom firmware makers/sellers to chime in and tell us more about it.

Considering that the cgminer API even has a report found block function, one does have to wonder just why not a single person has bothered to post anything proving said modified firmwares actually finds BTC blocks.

Hell, monitoring software like AwesomeMiner lets you set a trigger - Detect found blocks - to log it and notify ya. If folks are so fired up about using all these FW's then take the time to PROVE they work!

Should there be another caveat before anyone recommends anyone using these third party firmwares?

Have any of them proven that their firmware has been installed in a miner that has found a BTC block?

I've not seen anything to that affect, but it seems like lost of people don't care, even people who purportedly care about BTC

I purchased 20 s9's on ebay one had braiins.

I tested and liked it.

Many people offer firmware yet I don't use them. I am not into using firmware that violates copyrights etc.

There is only one firmware that doesn't violate the cgminer license.
Braiins is the only one that has a full valid source code to the software.

Supporting any others is supporting people who violate the license for the cgminer software that many people have spent years working on
... though most people including many in this thread don't seem to care - and will use or say they will use such firmware in the future.

The license is simple, you must supply source code for the miner upon request, if you distribute a firmware.
The cgminer source code has been there for 9 years, open source, GPL, and free to use.
Stop supporting people who break that license requirement.

So, how did you arrive at using Braiins firmware? Did you compare it against competitors like asic.to, chipless, etc. and it came out on top?

Thank you!

I have over 70 sha 256 miners mining about 2.1ph  I have 8th on brains  the rest on stock firmware.

To be fair  I have over 1 ph of bitmain gear purchased via paypal.  Thus a real warranty good unit May-June 2  So I won't bother touching this gear with after market firmware until June.

That is actually a great idea!

Someone should make a list or wiki.

I personally know only three users on Bitcointalk whose firmwares I would dare to use, and only two of them I am 100% sure of.

With all of the "evil" firmware out there... is there a wiki/sticky here somewhere that has a list of all firmware known to be good?
Perhaps even with stable OCs and/or undervolts along with the dev fees that each charges?

If it doesn't exist I think I'm probably not alone in thinking that it would be an amazing resource to have.

Many thanks
Potificate

Usually the firmware which is provided by the manufacturer is good enough, most of them put out some updated firmware from time to time (some of them disable SSH access like bitmain) but it does not really matter to most people.

the other option is to get an open source firmware like Braiins OS which is pretty good as well.

the real question tho, why do you want to change the firmware that comes with the miner? if it's to save a bit of power, do a bit of tuning then it's understandable, however if you are looking for 100% or 50% more hash rate then you shouldn't be mining in the first place, you should understand that the overall improvements you get from using "another" firmware are very limited, anything that is too good is simply fake.

Well no, the problem is that is the default setting in that program, if you wish to change the API access: make make it open to anyone who can connect to the miner.

This is my fault Kano, I did not know that I had enabled the setting in AM's Antminer API Access option page.

Also be aware - related to the above - that there are Windows viruses that do in fact change your pool settings in any miners they can find and point your miners to mining for someone else.

While standard manufacturer S9s so not allow this virus to affect your miners, a program like awesome miner has the standard option to allow such viruses to get into your miners.

I think it's important people should also realise that a virus check has no guarantee to find a virus - so if you do grab some software from somewhere and it passes your virus program check, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a virus.

Virus checkers only check for known viruses, so if someone makes a download and writes a new as yet unknown virus to put in it, it's possible to pass any virus program checks.

There is a saying, which goes 'there are no free dinners'.
And if something sounds too good to be true, then it most likely is not true.

It's that simple.

that's great!

@mikeywith, if you have the video link saved can you do a virustotal on the exe, use the link function in virustotal don't actually download the thing? I'm curious as to whether it's supposed to fiddle with the miner or use some sort of heuristic to find a wallet file that they can send to themselves?

Obviously this is quite a cheap gimmick. Anyone who's done anything with hacking or even certain code changes on the browser side will know how this can be done.

Fake firmware, works even without hash boards
https://business.facebook.com/asic.service/videos/2119808188348016/

I replied to the thread you have screenshot before it was deleted. I ran the linked “firmware” through VirusTotal, which alerted to it being a backdoor/trojan.

In this space especially, people need to be extremely cautious about everything they bring into their network environment. Only takes one mistake to have a realllly bad time.

I saw this on FB a few times, and today someone tried to catch some fish around the forum, luckly the topic was deleted, i hope nobody fell for it



what these people show you is a live miner running say at 15xhash, then they download this .exe file and launch it, go back to the same page and suddenly the hashrate is at 28-30xhash.

they started to be active since the fall of prices, when things started to get really rough for miners , they know many people will be more than willing to boost their hashrate by 2x, when lambo ?

always use your common sense, too good to be true ? scam !

- there is no way you getting 100% improvment on only software level
- running a windows executable file to modify a linux based miner is b.s that you should never trust regardless of the source.

you should also notice that many of those custom firmware have much higher dev fees than they claim,so should you decide to use one, monitor it closely.

stay safe fellow miners.