Topic: Bitmain introduces the Antminer S17 Pro, Antminer S17, and the Antminer T17 - page 25. (Read 11283 times)

I know I should wait, but I can’t help but feel like I’m going to be ordering one of these right away.

No word on s17 pro specs or price yet?  Seems like everyone knows the s17 but no one has a clue on the pro version

I guess I'll have to spend some time and check this ...

... since they've had Overt AB in the chips for years and no obvious large amount of Overt AB blocks on the network until they release the Overt firmware (before that was a 'small' amount by Dragon T1s which you can see the difference due to the different bits used)

I know James, with a little of -ck's help, did attempt to use (what is now called) AB in the miners after they came out ... but no idea if he used it long term, or if it was Covert or Overt

So if BM's been using Covert AB for years until the Overt firmware was released, the late empty blocks would be pretty obvious ...
I guess I can check that with a little code since I have the debug.log files for every server I've ever run since ... forever

... but I certainly don't remember seeing a lot of late empty blocks ...
... and the block header times mean nothing, it's when the blocks arrived, which I DO have that information from many server logs.

Bitmain was producing them minutes after a block change, and was producing-- prior to the blow up about covert AB-- upwards of 10% empty.

Not at all, however Jihan directly claimed as much to me.  I think it was largely but not entirely bluster, they very clearly ran several that in public they claimed were "independent".


I think you may misunderstand what is being claimed there: It takes time to find the collisions needed for covert AB.   When a block change happens, what do you do when you don't have a collision?   You mine an empty block where the collision has been precomputed, as that takes no time at all.   Once you find a collision with transactions you switch to that.  Sometimes finding a collision takes a rather long time, because you get unlucky.

I agree that it's speculative: the extremely high rate of very late empty blocks could also be attributed to poorly run software and there is plenty of evidence of that.  Bitmain controlled pools producing blocks that were invalid because of out of order transactions, where the tx order is what bitcoind would produce but swapped at some interior node in the hash tree is a lot harder to explain.

Less conspiracy theories and more provable facts please.
Like your withholding conspiracy theory, trying to play up some conspiracy theory you have without providing any actual proof.

The S9 chips have had Overt AB in them, that has recently (Nov) been activated by Bitmain's firmware upgrade.
However, you would have seen MANY of these "Block Version" blocks with this since 2016 if Bitmain was using the Overt AB they have in the chips.
So clearly they didn't do that, since they have always been a large % of the Bitcoin network, so it would be blatantly obvious.

So Bitmain DID release the firmware to everyone that uses Overt AB at the same time as they started using it themselves.

...and see below ...


Ignoring the rest of the conspiracy theories after the quote above ...

Empty blocks are only seen shortly after a block change.
You can thank your favourite pal LukeJr for that idea - he was the first to do it due to high orphan rates, due to running a crappy pool, and then pools like F2Pool and Bitmain copied him and expanded on it to do SPV mining (which is how F2Pool and AntPool together lost a total of 6 blocks in 2013)

Due to others (and my) 'blow up' of the empty block issue, they now send out more work soon after the block change to minise the number of empty blocks.
Almost ALL the large pools STILL produce empty blocks (slush included)
That hasn't changed, but only the NUMBER of those empty blocks on ALL those pools has reduced.

Your theory pretty much is saying that Bitmain runs every large pool

Edit: I should add, in case it's not obvious, if Bitmain decided to use Covert AB only 5% of the time - the first work sent out after a block change - then updated to a full block in the next work - that would be more unlikely than any other theory. Since only finding empty blocks shortly after a block change directly implies that Covert AB would only be used 5% of the mining time ... so rather pointless.


I only post/read here, I don't have a reddit account.
The only time I end up on reddit is searching about anime and the rare link from here in something I read

Edit: fun I just read that link. CW is a retard who cleary was never Satoshi - Satoshi's posts are so obviously different to CW that is not even possible.
You (and Gavin), on the other hand, post more like Satoshi than anyone else who was around early

Okay I will change it to had and not present tense.

Now even with all my points made to not use bitmain s17 or s17 pro

including that they took all my coupons away on march 31st.

I will buy 1 s17 and 1 s17 pro to demo to community.

I do plan to not buy more then that and go with the m20's

But I will have
1 s17
1 s17 pro
1 s15
1 t15
1 a1021
1 a921
8 m10's
10-20 m20's by sept 1

part of the buys are to show the gear to forum and on you tube.

Bitmain apparently no longer owns HashNest (BitDeer is owned by Bitmain). I was talking with the HashNest admins. They are still in close business relationship but are no longer the same company.

Also HashNest has been updated recently with new miners, S15 is out and they just launched Z11 preorder for end of the month

So basically

1)bitmain had and still has the ability to cheat on hashnest. edit bitmain may not own  hashnest anymore
2)bitmain had and still has the ability to cheat on bitdeer.
3)bitmain had the ability to use its covert asicboost.
4)bitmain and others had the ability to manipulate the tx fees as per this thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-all-miners-need-to-mine-on-a-pool-that-pays-them-the-tx-fees-2634505

and not only did that ability exist I had concrete evidence that  was being done by various pools back in 2017

Yes, I'm referring to later, not so kind of you to sit quietly amid all those claims that I was lying... when you could have instead happily bragged that you knew all along.   Oh well! I forgive you.

AFAIK I never posted about it on bitcointalk at all... perhaps if I had, I might have posted on the S9 thread. (although most of my testing was actually on an R4 and parts from R4s ...)

I posted it in the S9 thread about the S9 ... which is where it should have been.
Alas your claims about the S9 should have been posted in the same place.

They claim this, but the claim seems kind of absurd. The whole point of covert is that it's cover, it's nearly impossible to detect.

Consider though: at great expense they developed an significant performance optimization and baked it into their chips, huge numbers of which they ran themselves ... and then kept it secret but ... just didn't use it?  Why? because they like giving money away to the power company?

There is evidence that bitmain was asicboosting: among other things (Edit: e.g. as frodo mentions, the huge number of empty blocks, which have more or less magically gone away), they mined a small number of blocks that were invalid because transactions were out of dependency order. This would be a pretty difficult mistake to make-- unless you were grinding blocks by swapping around transaction order.  It's just not conclusive proof, unfortunately short of some massive internal document leak conclusive proof is likely impossible.

[Edit: The empty block part is really strong because unlike any other case you can compute the collisions for the empty blocks arbitrarily far in advance, so even if takes you tens of seconds to find one on the FPGA you can keep mining until one is found.]

Of course, there is also no reason to think that bitmain was the only booster.  I think its very interesting that the bitmain funded developers of bcash pushed surprisingly hard for their "canonical transaction order" change shortly after bitmain published overt AB support for their existing hardware... Might well be that once covert boosting wasn't an advantage it was best for overt supporters kill it on bcash in order to disrupt any miners whos hardware was less flexible than Bitmain's. (Because Bitmain used a rather overpowered FPGA for control they could switch between covert/overt/no-ab with just a firmware change... it would have been more power efficient though to have a separate asic for collision finding, but such a design might result in devices that lose half their hashrate when used with a mandatory transaction order or otherwise have to only mine empty blocks...)


Wow. No, I completely hadn't seen that-- I mean it was buried deep in a thread about a vendor who's hardware I didn't have at the time, and didn't mention asicboost in the post... all the details were in a pdf... I wouldn't be surprised if almost no one ever read it.  Too bad, because that was a pretty big revelation. Kudos to you.   It would have saved me an astonishing amount of time if I'd been aware of it.  (in particular figuring out the how to use the multi-midstate with no actual docs on the chip but simply picking through the software and bus captures with unreliable information extracted from the chip design was a big chore).  

As an aside, given that you knew this-- how come when I announced it and so many people were saying that I was lying about it being there, you didn't step up to point it out?

Well ahah I wouldn't say that's a rumor, we know this already .

No  rumor is April 9th   with more then one set of numbers  a normal model and  a pro model.

So I assume no one has any info on these s17's yet?

With 'merkle grinding' no one will use it.

Odd how gmaxwell in his "Wed Apr 5 21:37:45 UTC 2017" message goes on about:

The odd part being that I posted about the S9 having asicboost in July 2016 in the S9 hardware thread.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15634328

I guess he lives in his own little world and doesn't take note of what's going on.
Like segwit ... the great solution to Bitcoin ... that has yet again failed in the last 24 hours to do what it should with transactions ...

They should have implemented BIP100 like over 70% of miners voted for with their coinbases.

Much like hashnest and bitdeer their covert asic boost allowed for the action to happen.

So add hashnest bitdeer covert asic boost all may have been acts of fraud with no proof they were not doing it and the ability to do it.

Lastly if you read my thread that is stickied in pools I have certain proof that the high tx fee issue being done in 2017 was intentionally and that bitmain had the ability to do it and turn a profit.

Someone did it just not sure that bitmain did it. The proof of it being done was clearly shown in that thread.

Then I stand corrected. Maxwell's doc bookmarked for future reference.

That is incorrect. Covert AsicBoost does not use version rolling, but instead uses a method called "merkle grinding." Merkle grinding does not produce different block version numbers like version rolling does, hence its "covert" label. Gregory Maxwell described this method in much greater detail here.

We do not know with absolute certainty whether Bitmain used covert AsicBoost on Bitcoin's mainnet. There are signs that suggest they did. For example, merkle grinding tends to produce empty blocks, and Bitmain's pools do have a notorious history of mining empty blocks. Also, covert AsicBoost is incompatible with segwit, and we know that Bitmain did everything they could to prevent segwit's activation on Bitcoin. But beyond those signs, currently the only way to conclude that Bitmain did not use covert AsicBoost on Bitcoin's mainnet is by taking their word for it.

Why do I remember the whole covert AB drama being that the covert piece was that their AB allowed them to do so without a different version number? And that SegWit would make this covert version incompatible and thus their vehement opposition to that prop?

Wrong. Bitmains covert AB was never used on the main BTC network. That is a very different thing than the chips having the circuits in them but never turned on. BM never said anything about if the chips have AB circuits in them, they just said it was never ran outside of TestNet.

When any sort of AB is used it changes the block version number and NO blocks ever show that change before Dragonmints came online.