Regarding the priviate connection of bminer. I recall one people in this thread finds out that the private connection is to fetch devfee address. Now I guess I understand why bminer encrypts this connection. Otherwise, even with my limited hacking skill, I would be able to remove/hijack the devfee. I only run miners on mining rigs so I do not care. I think it is stupid to run any miner on a computer with sensitive data.

That's just the sad situation in the mining world. Open source projects on large coins do not get enough support, they just got beat by close source miners. All those miners are greedy. Claymore, bminer, dstm, and ewbf charge crazy amount of fees. Some people are greedy too, trying to hijack/remove fees (I recall there was a dstm fee remover recently). Simply no one plays fairly. Then miners start to use encrypted connections and we cannot monitor what they are doing. This is the reason why all miners are behaving like virus and marked as virus by most anti-virus software.

My main complaint to bminer and all other miners is that the devfee is too high. But I don't think they will change it.

BTW, Some people in this thread is very strange and suspicious. For example, if you check the history posts of @resiva, all of his past 4 posts are in this thread. Just like the sole purpose of this account is to say negative things about bminer. There are also a few newbie accounts only saying positive things about bminer. It is fun to watch those marketing accounts fighting back forth lol.

I have done my own testing: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2519271.msg29780550#msg29780550

For me, bminer is slightly better than dstm. I suggest other people should do their own testing because the difference is small. Maybe in your machines, the results will flip. You can follow @cryptoyes instructions to do that.