Topic: Do NOT trust Braiins OS+ - shady company, takes up to 10% dev fee and more - page 2. (Read 1147 times)

Only they know, or maybe if some large pools leak such data then you can get a good estimate of how much hashrate they have, the pool should know which "firmware" is responsible for every x amount of hashrate, but anyway, I personally couldn't care less, I just hope they are making  enough profit to keep their operations on going, competition in this market is very good for us as miners.


Sure thing, I'd imagine writing the first CPUminer was a lot harder than anything else that came after it, but still, it's very costly and time-consuming to do it even now.

Would be very interesting to know on how much hashrate they actually accumulate with all that miners running Braiins OS+, must be quite a lot. But I guess it is not that easy to code a Programm like that since nobody so far has done something similar for free.

They are making profit off of it, most custom firmware with added features like auto tune charge fees and make some good money, crowdfunding would make sense if someone was working on the original cgminer or coding something new while adding all these features and not taking firmware fees.

This is absolutely true, it is the mistake of the manufacturer to not step in and create a good software for their own product. With that in mind it is totally reasonable that Braiins want to keep a share for their effort, even if I would appreciate it more if they would simply do a crowdfunding or something.

Yet "some mining pool's owner" has no issue allowing all the new miners to mine to his pool as long as they use stock firmware, not only do they violate the Cgmier license, but they also have no proof of actually finding blocks just like most other custom firmware, cherry-picking the people you want to lecture is fine I suppose, as long as you don't mess with the big boys like Bitmain, Whatsminer, and Canaan your pool is relatively safe, meanwhile, practice all of your morals and on the little guys. 

Well the manufacturer has been making plenty of money selling the machines, so they could easily afford to develop their own mining program and yet...

On the other hand, the only group doing actual r+d of things not documented anywhere gets false accusations from jealous people who can't produce their own mining program either.

Braiins OS is the only solution that does not pirate cgminer, at least in its limited selection of supported ASIC miners that were painstakingly figured out without anyone's help.

Every time the manufacturer introduces a new model or does some change, this work needs to be done again to be able to support the new variant. Precisely because they did not release the changes they made to cgminer to support those changes, which is a clear violation of the license.

Makes sense to do that. It is kind of a shame that bitmain as the manufacturer of the ASIC can't do an equal mining program that they give to their paying customers. However it is great that it is possible that the developers of Braiins can earn money, since otherwise they wouldn't share the awesome software.

Nope - can't do that. It's a type of software license key. ANY firmware that uses the DEVfee model requires that it can periodically  'phone home', in this case to get the DEVfee work and send back the results. If the connection is blocked the miner stops working until the connection is reestablished.

If some of the hashrate is sent to slush pool, wouldn't it be at least be possible to block the connection to the pool? You would not get the 2% of hashrate back, but maybe this would lower the power consumption if the miner will not be able to connect to the pool that usually takes the 2%

Why don't you test it yourself then? You have a pool don't you? Didn't you say others don't test and yet you are doing precisely that, not testing but seeding FUD, like all the time you claimed it didn't find blocks, and yet, it always did.

You are doubting the hashrate split, and you can easily test that yourself. You can for sure determine you get 97.5% (or 98%) and not 90% like OP is claiming without any evidence.

You are free to speculate what the 2% or 2.5% of the hashrate is used for since its encrypted, believe it or not, it goes to the pool operated by Braiins which was formerly called Slush Pool. But what you cannot say is that this is suddenly "10%", that is a blatant lie.

Speaking of closed source, i have still not seen you demanding Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan and others publish their modifications to cgminer. Its funny you say "Braiins just read the code of others" while you yourself seem to have only reached (somehow, not disclosed how) the BM1397 but not the BM1398. Oh and how long has bosminer+ supported BM1397 before you added it to cgminer? So no.

Braiins did the work to figure those chips out, did you? Those who just mod cgminer with the implementation already done by the manufacturer are oblivious about this work. It is not the same thing at all, its like "pirating" existing software vs making an alternative to replace it from scratch.

Ah yes, there is also the BM1396, BM1362, BMi1366...

You are quoting a bunch of numbers there and claims that cannot be proven.

It's closed source, and the output data to slush is encrypted, no matter what pool you mine on.

Not sure why you keep making the same statements without anyone being able to prove them.

Though it is quite clear that some of what you have stated is marketing, not fact.
The 2% and 2.5% cannot be guaranteed, they are an estimate based on random data.
Saying they are 'immutable' and 'hard coded' means nothing more than make people feel warm and fuzzy but not a guarantee of an actual number.

As already explained, they can be way off and restarting the miner wont make up for the losses.

Well, if you want to find out, mine against your own pool. Its not like there is not a pool operator posting here for some reason...

The fee is 2.5%, this is immutable and hard coded. For S9, it is 2%, also hard coded and immutable. There are no choices of changing this. Unlike other firmware, you cannot add hidden groups on top of the existing one by request, whitelabel, or whatever.

Point it to your own pool locally and measure, you will get either 97.5% or 98% of the hashrate. The miner dashboard reports 100% (Real) hashrate, the pool will only get 97.5% or 98% from that.

If you add groups and assign a fixed ratio, you will notice there is a hidden group always taking 2.5%, so you only have 97.5% available to split. Its not 90%, 95%, or whatever random fake account of the month decides to invent because they don't like when i point the fact that all other firmware infringes cgminer license while Braiins doesn't. Too bad that pool operator doesn't care and prefers to join the badmouthing crowd without proof, as usual.

Farm proxy is another project, and has a different license. It has no fees, can be used without Braiins OS.

Indeed, nobody should be exempted from criticism, I was not implying that you should not point fingers to Braiins, I was merely trying to say that just because Bitmain claims other firmware are viruses it does not mean we should believe them, in the same way I would not trust Braiins with fees stated on thier website without examining that myself.



My English is far from perfect, but the way I understand the link you posted is 10% of the fees stated, so fees*1.1 or fees*0.9 not 100%*0.1, but your title states 10% of 100% which is why I think it was taken out of context, but I don't disagree with the fact that the statement could be interpreted in a different way and that they have to be more detailed.

Alas that theory is based on nothing.
Current stratum has 2 things that come and go except during connections. Work from the pool and shares to the pool.
Though due to slush not wanting to fix his pool code and fix stratum, when I argued it with him at the start, stratum has two items related to work.

Their pool already claims to allow other information to be passed, but since it's encrypted, you cannot tell when or how often other information is passed to slush and what it is.

Assuming it will only be shares and work is already obviously incorrect.

Thanks for the info, I understand that Braiins has benefits over stock and we are agreeing on the same things. I don’t believe Bitmain is a guardian angel but my purpose of the post is to hold Braiins to account as well. I have no doubt your claims are true, but it doesn’t exempt them from criticism. Braiins is a for-profit company, just like Bitmain is - we should see no difference between them.

I want to make a comparison here: Antbleed for example was a theoretical exploit by Bitmain that caused a huge commotion and yet has never been spotted in the wild. Bitmain offered a explanation for it (which made sense but I take with a grain of salt) and removed it from their code. Now compare it to the fact that there’s 1000s of devices sending hash rate to slushpool at a much higher rate than users know. I believe that is a much bigger issue and is more of a “virus”. Aside from that, I believe Bitmain locks SSH due to the fact you stated yourself - that users would install viruses.

The license is not taken out of context, I provided the link and posted a specific part that doesn’t seem to make sense. I’d love if Braiins would clarify any of this. I totally agree that we need to have a proper test; we need more transparency about this altogether.

I don't even want to discuss the efficiency difference between the stock firmware and the custom firmware, I have tested them on hundreds of miners, and the auto-tuning on custom firmware makes my gears more effienct and run a lot cooler, while I don't use BO+ (I use a different famous custom firmware) I would like to point out something regarding the fees.

At least for the ones I tried, the perctange is time based, the software assumes your miner will run for 24 hours straight, so that's 1,440 mins, so it needs to mine to the devfee pool for 28.8 mins to get a 2%, but they won't let you mine to your own pool for 1,411.2 mins and then take their 28.8 mins, they will split the 28.8 mins into short intervals, which usually starts in the first a few minutes after the miner get's to it's peak/stable hashrate, so let's assume they wait for 2 mins to get their first 28.8/24 mins, so you get 2 mins on your pool and then they get 1.2 on theirs, at this point the fee is 26.66%, it only becomes 2% if the miner runs for a whole hour and they get only 1.2 mins, but if your miner is tuning or restarting for whatever reason, the fees will be a lot higher.

the above was just an example, I don't recall the exact figures of how the brain or even the firmware I use goes about collecting fees, but I have carefully inspected the fee collecting process and you can only come to a conclusion after letting your miner mine for long enough, I am not saying your concern is wrong, but I saw someone claim that some custom firmware fees were like 30% simply by counting the accepted shares, but then he ignored the fact that the devfee pool had a very low difficulty and thus had a dozen more accepted shares than the main pool.

I would suggest a somehow accurate way to confirm the fees, use the stock firmware at default settings, mine to a pool for 1 week and then get your week average hashrate, use BO+ for another week and see your new average hashrate, I am positive it won't be anywhere near 10%, not even 1% higher than the claimed fee.

Now regarding their shady way of dealing with the license I have nothing to say about that, you presented your case nice and clean.


That doesn't mean bitmain is a guardian angel, they lock their firmware in a very disgusting way, you can't even change the fan speed, the only firmware that had a few options was the multi-option firmware for the S9 and after that you could hardly do anything with your miner, besides, bitmain don't want to deal with support/warranty tickets, overclocking your miner makes it more likely to break.


Just another false claim by the devil Bitmain, in fact, most viruses I heard of or dealt with personally like Nightswitcher, Antbuild were in the stock firmware, of course, that doesn't mean custom firmware are not subject to the same viruses, but after all, most of these viruses are the result of reckless actions take by the miner's owner.

In the end, as I said, I don't use BO+, I wouldn't advise anyone to not/use it, but I think it's somehow unfair to read out of context and claim the fees are 10% without having had a proper test.

My point of making this post was not to bash on Braiins OS as a firmware or it’s efficiency. It was to raise awareness about about Braiins’ misleading claims and deceptive practices. These are some pretty big issues ignored by the mining community as we tend to have a “every man for themselves” attitude - which is normal but personally I would try to stop people from using it, or at the very least, hope to get an answer from Braiins.

In theory you can get close if you are not mining at the same pool they are. IF you just follow the where you can see how many stratum requests do to dave pool and how many go to slushpool.
Some basic math will get you in the ballpark. You would probably not be able to see 2.5% vs 3.25% but could figure out 2.5% vs 7%

As for the firmware itself, there are plenty of users who have reported lower energy use along with the same or better poolside hashrate. So from anecdotal evidence there are many people who use it and are satisfied.
Some people have seen no benefit or even worse results, even in the same farm. So at a guess if the equipment is already at it's limit there is very little else that can be done.

Would I use it? No, but that's me and my choice, I would not stop anyone from using it if they felt it worked for them.

-Dave

Alas you cannot, it encrypts the 'extra' data inside the miner, so you can only see 'where' it is going.
You cannot see how much the fee is nor what other data is sent.
Also it's close source so you can't even check any of that.

I believe a lot of people would care if its 10%.

Your second point brings me to my concern with Stratum V2 that I mentioned - the protocol Braiins is aggressively spearheading. This would not allow you to see any packets with Wireshark nor what they contain.

Not going to comment on what you believe is worth it or not, I believe it is and we can disagree on that.