Topic: Do NOT trust Braiins OS+ - shady company, takes up to 10% dev fee and more - page 3. (Read 1052 times)

From what I am reading, it's not saying 10% it's saying 2% to 2.5% +/- 10% so it can be as low as 1.8% or as high as 2.75% and although I don't think many people would care about it being 10% less there are a lot of people who would complain about 10% more.

And with a tiny bit of network knowledge and equipment it's easy to see where where data is flowing to and from for your miner. And see where and what is being done. MANY people dislike aftermarket mining software and would love to stand up and scream and show proof of what it's doing. A bit of wireshark and you can see every packet coming in and out of your miner. Now that's not to say they could not be doing other things in the background. i.e. underclock and undervolt when mining for you and overclock and overvolt when mining for them, but in reality that much extra programing and work for what would in the end be not that much more hash is probably not worth it.

-Dave

Hi Dave, thanks for pointing that out. Regardless, it was gone since then, for an entire 6 months, and I made numerous attempts to tell them to correct it, they haven't. I have emails from their support (and they can confirm this) that they updated that page only a few days ago.

I feel like the bigger issue here is a 10% dev fee and their obvious attempts to make people unaware of it. And again, as of today, their website still links to a different license.

I disagree with your second point because a) I've seen a improvement in hash rate and power use with stock firmware and b) the aforementioned 10% dev fee.


Hi Phil, I have no clue why you would assume that or what I would gain from that. Is Bitmain paying me to tell people to use stock firmware? I wish. If I had another account, why wouldn't I say this there?

Also, this is the internet and no matter what account I use, you and I are both behind a keyboard.

To all braiins + charges a fee.

and braiins + allows superior underclocking for many

models of bitmain gear.

So if you have gear that runs hot and needs to be downclocked braiins + and regular braiins are likely a better choice then stock bitmain gear.

If you are running any type of  s9 at 16 th you are not underclocking that s9

you are better off with bitmain firmware.

 since you are pushing the gear hard and it works with high power use.

so op has some accuracy in the case of pushed s9 gear of any type.

but the s9 gear has passed its life for many miners.

i use some braiins and some braiins plus with s17 and t17 gear and it keeps my gear cool for the summer.

so the op is completely missing that point.

also the op is obviously not new and is hiding behind a newbie account.

so to talk about a lack of transparency is sad why not just post who you are instead of hiding behind your keyboard.

this is phil from howell,nj 07731 signing out.

Looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120417/https://braiins.com/os/plus/license the license page was there as of 7 Feb 2022 so between then and when you forced an archive back in July it changed. Could have been 2 minutes before you clicked on it or it could have been 2 minutes after the last archiving. Unless someone else archived it someplace else we can't know.

As for the percentages / hash rate some people feel the power savings and speed improvements that *they* see is worth it. As always YMMV. Some people have discussed good speed improvements and much lower power use. Others, like you have seen very little or none. If you have hardware that can be pushed harder at a lower voltage you will probably benefit more then someone putting it on an old & abused miner that can't do much more.

-Dave

Hi everyone,

This post is regarding the dev fee in Braiins and my concerns with their Stratum V2 protocol.

Here’s what their FAQ says about the “dev fee”:


When you click on the License hyperlink it takes you to the License for their other product, Farm Proxy. (https://braiins.com/farm-proxy/license) That license makes no mention of a dev fee.

Here is the interesting part.

I changed the URL to go to braiins(.)com/os/plus/license and there was a 404 error.
I proceeded to save this page on the Waybackmachine on archive.org (on July 26th) - you can check it out here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220726060453/braiins.com/os/plus/license

(I will explain later in this post why I saved it on archive.org)

I contacted their team about this last month and told them to fix this. Here is what they had to say:


They did not correct the link. As of today, they still haven’t.
I contacted them again early this month, and they gave me the exact same response.

I contacted them again, and asked if they could simply send a link to the real license, as they must’ve made one. I got a reply 3 or 4 days later on 2022-08-04, and it was exactly what I assumed they would do.

​
So theres that. They changed the link that I saved earlier that goes to a 404 page to show the real license, only a few days ago. I have emails with them to support this. Here is what their license says:

What do we see from all this?

• Braiins only added the license for their site after I asked them for it
• The original link to the license on every page of their site still goes to https://braiins.com/farm-proxy/license as of today despite my numerous attempts to point it out to them.  As of September 2nd, it now redirects to the real license. However, they were aware of this error for months and simply refused to fix it.
• The license says the computing power at the "start of every session" is random and takes few seconds before a "correct percentage ... is assigned". Yet in the next sentence, it then says "the amount of computing power assigned at any given time to perform processing operations for Braiins may be as much as 10 % higher or lower". So, which one is it? These statements are contradictory, or at the very least designed to be misleading.
• Braiins OS+ is closed source, and theres no way in the software to show how much is going to this "dev fee". It simply shows the total hash rate, always.
• A bit unrelated but: the Stratum V2 protocol they've been spearheading would allow them to do whatever they want and take whatever hash power, as it is encrypted and no one would be able to tell

My advice for everyone is to use the stock Bitmain firmware (the company Artemis3 here seems to hate with a passion) because it gives the exact same hash rate as Braiins OS+. Yes, it really does. For example, on an Antminer S9 their new firmware gives several options, and one of them is to increase the hash rate by 2TH. I tried this myself, and my hash rate is 16.5th/s - the exact same I got with Braiins.

I wish people here would stop blindly trusting shady firmwares without reading into things and start asking questions.
What is a dev fee? Where can we see it? Why is the link for their license going to a different product? Why would Bitmain prevent you, the customer, from making it difficult to install a custom firmware? Miners are not game consoles. Bitmain is not Nintendo or Sony. Bitmain calls custom firmwares viruses on their official website - is that not what this is? Braiins OS+ does not show you how much of your hash rate is going towards this dev fee. There's no doubt that this is by design.

In my opinion, these are huge issues and a stain on Braiins. I can no longer trust them, nor can I support the Stratum V2 protocol that they are spearheading since it seems like an obvious way to encrypt data from their dev fee to their server (as much as up to 10%) without anyone noticing.

Edit: as of September 2nd, the links to their website now redirect to their actual license - I have updated the post to reflect that. My other concerns still remain.