Quote from: Lunga Chung on August 30, 2019, 06:54:12 AM

I fully understand the concept for AW firmware for S9, on the other hand you are basically giving your user base to VNISH without any benefit to you or your customers (if i got it right you don't participate in 2% fee). There is a lot of additional features you can add to this firmware which would make a great tool for larger farms. I bet if you would lower fee to say 1% and make FW work only with AM (something like ASICseer has) this would produce more gains to you and VNISH as well.
In order to incentives you customers to switch to "your" firmware there needs to be some kind of exclusivity and gain...

Thanks for your feedback and comments - they are always welcome!

Of the 2% mining fee we are actually getting half of it. So we do benefit from customers that go for the Awesome Miner firmware. This is also the reason why we can provide product support for it and also integrate it well with Awesome Miner. Users of other Vnish firmware do get most of the features as well, so your point is valid that we do give away features to a larger user base. Some features like setting Mining Profiles via Awesome Miner is exclusive to our brand of the firmware. We could make more feature exclusive, but we are also trying to be nice to our customers and respect what decisions they make.

It's however not possible for us to control this pricing model of the firmware by much, as it needs to align with what the Vnish firmware uses for other firmware brands. We don't have the option to make the mining fee 0% or 1% as it cannot compete with other Vnish brands by providing a lower fee. This is why I stated above that although I appreciate any feedback and comments related to the pricing, it cannot change and it will stay on 2%. The only direction we are allowed to change the mining fee is to make it higher (2.5% or 3%), but I know this isn't what you where looking for.

As we cannot make the mining fee lower, the only option left that I can see would be to make Awesome Miner not consuming any licenses as long as you are running Antminers with our firmware. We would have to investigate this more, but it might be either license + 2% mining fee or no license requirements + 2.5% mining fee for example. Everyone may not like the concept, but it's an option - just like using this firmware is an option.

Please note that my comments in the section above is just about exploring possibilities based on the topic we discuss - it's not something we have in the pipeline or decided to go for. Please consider this point when reading the statements above. Thanks!

Quote from: esol on August 30, 2019, 11:39:07 AM

Thanks for the very accurate answer; honestly Im surprised that your developer staff doesnt have the skills and resources to develop a custom firmare based on original BM source side!

I could do it even by myself with my limited programming experience if only I wish to invest some time on a project like that; however it would be a nonsense for the limited miners I have to manage and most of all, the wide availability of free open source solution currently available for free.

I think that Awesome Miner (that is definitely not a cheap product...) should have had to offer his his solution to their customers for free as did by SlushPool with Brains OS, that is neither restricted to run in their pool!

A matter of style before any other economic or technical onside consideration, but again, its just my humble opinion.

All the best
/ Enrico

Hi Enrico,

Thanks for the additional feedback. It's appreciated.

You are correct that there are some older source code available for S9, but it's not up-to-date and lacks features. And going forward, it's way more complicated on S15 and S17 where there is nothing to start from. As we need to maintain focus on delivering good solutions for monitoring and management of mining operations, we see firmware as something where we need partnerships and integrations rather than investing in the development ourselves. It would of course be nice if we could do all this on our own, but it's unfortunately not realistic for us based on our observations.

It's very nice of the Braiins team to release BraiinsOS free of charge, open source and with full flexibility. I fully agree with your point here. But as we don't have the other income sources as I assume they have with Slushpool, we don't have the luxury of giving away the solutions we develop. We always try to be as nice and flexible as possible to make our customers happy, but at the end of the day we also need to run a sustainable business in order to support our customers long term.

I appreciate your comments about the pricing. A general note is that Awesome Miner is actually less expensive than some of the other popular premium solutions for monitoring. The goal is always to make our users happy by making it possible for them to run their mining operations as smooth as possible, making our software solution valuable for them.

Many thanks for your opinions and comments!