Hi everyone,
I’d like to start by saying I gain nothing at all from posting this. I just want to let everyone know of this company's shady practices. If people call me a troll because I have one post, well, I can only say I warned you.
I was considering switching to Braiins OS+ recently, and came across the website. Here’s what their FAQ
says about the “dev fee”:
When you use Braiins OS+, we collect a 2-2.5% dev fee (depending on hardware model) by directing that percentage of your hashing power to our pool. It’s up to you which pool you mine with for the remaining 97.5-98%. Note that the dev fee is never exactly the specified percentage of your total hashing power, as this number is always changing in real-time whenever you are mining. However, it will always remain within a fixed tolerance as described in the License.
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.
Now 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, and here's what they had to say:
I'll follow up on it from our team and will let you know ASAP.
Regards,
--
Behzad
Support Team
braiins.com I slushpool.com
They did not correct the link. As of today, they still haven’t.
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 (apparently last updated on March 30, 2020, by the way). You can check it yourself, and here's what it says:
You acknowledge that due to the nature of computing power and computing power routing it is not technically possible to always assign the exact percentage of computing power. Therefore, You acknowledge that the amount of computing power actually assigned by the Software at the start of each session is random and it takes few seconds before a correct percentage of computing power is assigned. For the same reasons 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 than the amount agreed above according to the section 5 hereof.
Now, 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
- 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"
- 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.
My advice for everyone is to use the stock Bitmain firmware (the company Artemis 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?
In my opinion, this is a huge issue and a stain on Braiins. I can no longer trust them, I can no longer support the Stratum V2 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.