Quote from: Biodom on April 06, 2017, 02:02:08 AM

kano said that bitmain is using asicboost, which everybody thought was just patented software.
now, some info came out that bitmain is using asicboost covertly in hardware...check reddit for details.
This "covert" asicboost would be negated by segwit, apparently, which explains why bitmain is so opposed to segwit.
Current exposé also explains very well why they were mining a lot of empty blocks-check it out.

I am not a specialist in soft or hardware, so don't know if such claims are true, but if they are, i expect a reaction.
It would look like bitmain rejected segwit based on very selfish motives.

EDIT: sources say that Segwit blocks can be mined with Bitmain's hardware. However, and this is critical..

Quote

Using the covert, disabled in public hardware ASICBOOST implementation they can not mine blocks with SegWit commitments.

"they" being Bitmain and possibly other miners in cahoots (large pools in china?)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63oxzv/so_all_this_bitmain_ver_jihan_bu_drama_is/

tl;dr Allegedly, Bitmain sold you a miner with a hardware feature (that it has control over) that enables 20-30% 'faster' mining for them, but not for YOU (as it is switched OFF in publicly available hardware).

I doubt BM have control over the miner after this entry into the hosts file:

Code:

root@antMiner:~# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.0.1 auth.minerlink.com auth

More interesting would be how to use the ASICBOOST feature in bitmains (s9) miners to level the paying field, reduce bitmain's advantage and increase our edge until this is patched. To enable the feature requires an entry into the bmminer config and a compatible pool.

Does kano or anyone else have aspirations & know-how to implement this into the pool software? Seems (fromn reddit) some private pools have started using this already.

bitsink

Posts

Merits