Topic: Bitmain's Released Antminer S9, World's First 16nm Miner Ready to Order - page 341. (Read 531164 times)

To let users run the latest Bitmain gear? I don't disagree with your sentiment, but it seems like most other pools will be able to work with S9?

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I saw the option to buy for at least 5 days ago until tonight when I checked back just to look at specs and things again.

They are still not for sale.  Are they waiting for something in the exchange rate to change?

14TH at 1375 watts? At fixed difficulty that will take 110 days... By the way all the s9's are already sold LOL. The miner is 2.5 times more efficient in terms of power to GH as the s7

buying s-9's in bulk  is only for those with very low power cost, psu's in hand and some s-7's or avalon6's to sell off.

Thanks fellow S7 B1 buyer! This made me laugh out loud.

Yeah, but since Bitmain is definitely a for-profit company they hate to pay anything out, even if it's meager compensation. They want money flowing into their pockets, not out. At the very least I would hope the would be more careful with their schedule and promises.

Anyway you're right. As the current monopoly they can do anything they want. And there are enough people on this forum who have short memories and a talent for rationalization where it comes to buying overpriced hardware that Bitmain's behavior doesn't really matter.

all good points, actually.

You should never consider your ROI in any other currency than BTC as that is what these things (miners) produce.  I believe what Carrollfilms was trying to express is that this machine costs 3.659 BTC to purchase and given free power and 0% network growth it will not return that same 3.659 BTC for over 200 days.  Assuming 100% up-time, perfect pool luck, no network growth, and having access to free energy is absolutely ridiculous.  So in reality it will be well over 200 days, likely close to a year for most people to earn their BTC back (and most will never actually see their initial investment come back).

Why would you only consider cost in BTC when we all live on Euro, USD, GBP, etc? If the price of BTC goes up 2x over the next year and I simply purchase 3.659 BTC today I will double my fiat currency.  If I purchase this miner and BTC doubles, I have something less than 3.659 BTC in a year (because this thing will never ROI) and therefore less than double my fiat currency.  Why buy the miner when you can simply buy the coin and have more BTC at any point between now and a year from now?  No risk of hardware failure, no variables to consider, etc.

Purchasing a miner that you know cannot ROI is essentially giving Bitmain a loan with the expectation of only receiving a portion of your loan amount back.  You're giving your money away.  

Some might say they don't mind mining at a loss as it is adding support the network.  At this point your hash power is not making the network any more secure.  You could help the network, again, by simply purchasing BTC and using some of it and saving some of it.  Transaction volume and capitalization are more important than more hash power.  Not to mention giving your money to Bitmain is giving your money to the largest pool and manufacturer.  You are likely actually causing harm to the network by supporting more centralization.

I will step off my soap box now.

Time will tell.. think I'll start pulling out of the mining train now, new miners have so much speculation this far in, for most people it's a coinflip to tell whether or not you'll make a profit or not.

Bitfury's lost the tug of war, looks like this is going to be the future - where Bitmain makes the chips - for insane amounts of money!

It also depends on how much time the user get's before having.  Say the user get's 25-30 day's before having that is a pretty big advantage over a user after having with addded difficulty to (but again speculation).

I agree it's a lot of speculation and not guaranteed (mining never is at this point) on ROI.  But this is the one to beat as far as efficiency which is big for those non "free" users.  Hard to put "free" users in same equation even as they have huge advantage.   But for non "free" I think this will become the miner to own after having for most (again speculation on my part).

Past the halving, price prediction is just guesstimation. It could be stable with half the network hashrate dropping dead, or the prices could rise 300%. Nobody knows, at this point the s9 is about as risky as the S1 in 2013. You either could strike it rich or make nothing like the S3. There are so many crappy factors going into this like the fact that the s9 may not be supported by some pools that it's not worth the risk imo. It's purely up to you, though, because this might be used on altcoins, although the profit margin is pretty slim with other altcoins.

Sure, 14TH is huge, but when you have that much competition with other miners around the world with even "free" electricity, 14TH is going to be the equivalent of, say , 5TH today.

We must also consider longevity of your investment.  Which one will last longer when difficulty rises with power costs in mind?

EDIT:  Keep in mind, I did not say "when" difficulty will rise significantly.

It's hard to predict the amount of hashrate going away because of inefficient miners. Nor any price rise because of the halving. Which makes it quite risky to buy a miner where you got no guarantee  of how much it will let you earn you.

Suppose the price goes back to 400 after the halving, then you are screwed...

Keep in mind it could change with BTC value.  Say you put in the 2kish and mine if there keeps being surges in BTC price that will also help for longer mining.  Leading up to having btc value has been nice.  

After having some miners might come offline to due to efficiency, it's all speculation.  S9's with amazing efficiency they will be able to run after having no doubt.  So again difficulty I think is hard to say after having.   There are some circumstances that would make it a good investment, but mining never has been a sure thing.

Weren't they trying to improve the p2pool protocol which failed miserable?

14Th/s sounds like a nice big number. I threw it into a mining calculator and even with free electricity and the halving reward put in it would take 200+ days. But that is with a fixed a difficulty.

I feel sorry for the folks that will end up buying one of these at the price they're currently at.

I'm hoping, either, higher hashing power machines come out, or they are made and sold cheaper.

We get it.  CKPool won't work with the Antminer S9 by default at this time.  It is a shame Bitmain doesn't respect software licensing.  No need to take it any further than that.

Well then I'll describe it in more detail so that people will learn why to ignore your comment.

The stratum protocol has a set of 'methods' involved in connecting to a pool and starting mining.
They do NOT include the new, undocumented, unknown 'method' Bitmain has added to the S9 called "mining.multi_version"

In CKPool we don't allow random changes/additions to the stratum protocol to "just work".
Thus the change means that until we implement a change in CKPool to ignore it, after somehow finding out somewhere what exactly it is, you can't mine on any CKPool pools.
I have no idea what other pools do, you'd have to ask them.
CKPool pools are only around 5% of the bitcoin network as far as I know, though it could be higher ... since BWPool used it at one stage and there was some talk about Bitfury considering it at one stage.
(Yes someone has pointed an S9 at 2 large CKPools)

Do you allow random changes/additions to the bitcoin protocol to "just work" on your pool?
No.
Why would you allow random changes/additions to the stratum protocol to "just work"?

As for the actual change:

Bitmain's cgminer git:
https://github.com/bitmaintech/cgminer

Notice any of the new code in there? No.
They are required by the cgminer license to make it available to anyone who has an S9.

What haven't they done? Type one single simple command to update the public git.

What's the usual excuse given to me by Bitmain employees each time this happens?
They're too busy, they'll get around to it later.
Too busy to type one command ... ... ... ... for code that's already compiled and live in the S9.

I think some people are misunderstanding what Kano said.  The miner sends extra information while negotiating the stratum connection.  Presumably this extra information means something at antpool and serves some purpose.  But Kano's pool is setup so that if you don't follow protocol exactly you get dropped.  He said it was for anti-DDoS reasons.  Makes perfect sense.  So Kano's pool will drop this miner at connection because it doesn't follow the rules exactly.  Other pools may not be setup the same way.  They may see the extra info, disregard it, and let the miner connect and start mining anyway.  We don't know yet.

Sort of reminds me of email server configurations.  Some mail servers conform with the rules exactly to reduce spam and eliminate the ability of others to spoof email from them, some mail servers are much looser about it.  Some mail servers will still inter-operate with misconfigured mail servers, and some won't.

But this miner hasn't really been released yet.  The one that gets shipped may not include this stratum change.  We don't know yet.  If it does include it, it still doesn't mean the miner only works at antpool, other pools might still work, we just know for sure that Kano's won't. 

Finally, the config files may be fixable by SSH.  But it seems certain that even if you can't permanently change a file and fix it, you could replace the files using SSH to eliminate the issue until the miner is rebooted at least.  That would be a PITA but it seems likely that that work around would work.

GPU isn't a viable solution for mining for the long term! Low security which makes it very cheap to take over the network and there is no guarantee that mining will be much more decentralized than today. I mean we are competing with BitFury who was funded by the Georgian government. Also I suspect that they have enough liquidity for a massive investment in any kind of equipment to match the new mining algorithm. Let's not forget that BitFury was mining on a 110TH/s FPGA rig when everyone was just discovering FPGA mining. If they have been quiet in the last period it doesn't mean that they lost their skill and their ability to do business.