Hi,

Thanks for your detailed reply and your honest feedback - it's appreciated.

It may not have been a fully fair evaluation of the firmware performance if there at the same time were attempts made to bypass the DevFee pool mining. It becomes difficult to tell if it's an evaluation of the firmware performance or an evaluation of the firmware tamper protection.

Anyway, I do see the main point you bring up here, related to the mining fee. I will try to give some background information here to at least explain it - also because there were a number of posts about the mining fee earlier in this thread.

First of all, we have not developed this firmware from scratch on our own. We don't have the resources to do that. The firmware is the result of a partnership where we have been working close with a firmware developer to provide better integration between the Antminer firmware and the Awesome Miner application. For this reason, I don't have control over the mining fee level. If we would have the resources to develop our own firmware, it would of course be a completely different case regarding the mining fee.

It all started with a number of existing users contacted us and pointed out that they successfully been testing different custom firmware (all with ~2% mining fee) and wanted to deploy this on a larger scale with better Awesome Miner integration. When running mining operations at this scale, getting performance improvements of >10% results in quite a large amount of extra income - making it easy for them to accept a mining fee. Other users were already running some custom firmware solutions with a 2% mining fee, but also wanted a better integration with Awesome Miner.

By making this firmware partnership that resulted in the Awesome Miner Antminer firmware in combination with better Awesome Miner integration - we could offer a solution to these users that made them super happy. As some already had firmware solutions with a 2% mining fee, the Awesome Miner firmware delivered better integration for the same mining fee.

I do understand that the concept of a mining fee can upset some users. However, the alternatives we had was never about having a mining fee or not having a mining fee - it was about if we would provide this firmware as an option to the users that would find it valuable - or not provide any firmware solution at all.

So the bottom line is that the firmware, with the mining fee, is offered as an option for those that finds it a valuable. Some of our customers are very happy with this solution but I also have full understanding that the firmware may not be for everyone. If someone is looking for an open source solution without a mining fee, BraiinsOS is a great option. I've had a number of discussions with the BraiinsOS developers to make sure Awesome Miner runs fine with their firmware. From an Awesome Miner perspective, you should of course be able to run the firmware solution you want - but I don't see anything wrong in giving our users one more option to choose between. If our reputation is questioned because of this, I might have failed in explaining the idea behind the firmware as it wasn't released with the intent to make anyone upset - just in response to what some of our users were asking for.

Thanks!