What is Bitcoin(BTC) Mining Software?

Where Bitcoin (BTC) mining hardware is the equipment needed to mine Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin (BTC) mining Software controls how this equipment runs and interfaces with Bitcoin (BTC) and the different mining pools, and the Software is used to manage your Miner (s) and to optimize their performances.

To better understand the different types of Bitcoin (BTC) Mining Software, we will break these into several different categories:

ASIC mining firmware.

This is the code that is running on the actual device. When you buy a miner from the manufacturer, it comes installed with their stock firmware. While this firmware is sufficient to mine Bitcoin (BTC), it is not always the best to use. You also have the option of using third-party firmware that other companies provide.

Monitoring and Management Tool

Some solutions are solely used to understand the performance of your Miner (s). This specialized tool is useful when managing multiple miners to help ensure that each mining device runs appropriately and efficiently.

Mining Protocol

This protocol is the communication bridge between the Bitcoin (BTC) network and the mining pool. Stratum V1 is the most commonly used protocol which is used by the majority of the mining pools. Stratum V1 has some shortcomings but will be improved upon with Stratum V2. Stratum V2 helps reduce mining centralization, protects miners from having hashrate stolen, and enhances communication between miners and mining pools.

Mining Bit-streams

This Software is responsible for communication between mining pools and the ASIC firmware. The pool and miners can communicate what work needs to be done and how the hashing needs to be used by the mining machines.

Knowing a bit about each of the mining Software types, we can dive into each of them in greater detail and explore the different options of Software that exist.

ASIC Mining firmware

By default, your mining hardware comes installed with stock manufacturer firmware, but did you know that other options can be used to add additional mining features and even improve mining efficiency?

Stock (Manufacturer) Firmware

This is the default firmware that will ship with your ASIC miner. This firmware is a closed-source, internally developed firmware from the manufacturer.

Bitmain's Antminer Firmware ships with the hardware. This firmware allows you to customize some parameters of the mining hardware but restricts some features to protect their customers from damaging the hardware. As an ASIC manufacturer, the last thing you would want is for your customers to break their newly acquired equipment. Manufacturers claim that by keeping the Software, （APP） closed-source, they can ensure the miner "works correctly" and remains "secure." While it may protect your ASIC from damage or improper use, it severely limits the ASIC's full capabilities.

Following the ethos of Bitcoin (BTC), you may be able to see how closed-source Software is a lousy approach for mining hardware manufacturers. Over the years, a couple of incidents have shifted users' preference away from closed-source stock firmware.

Here are a few examples: Antbleed In 2017, a hidden Software component called "Antbleed" was included in ASIC miners created by Bitmain. It enabled Bitmain to take remote access of any of their customers' miners at any given time. Bitmain argued that this "feature" was used as a management diagnostic tool, but in reality, this could allow Bitmain to disable any of their customers' miners at any time.

As people learned about this, they became very concerned that Bitmain might take advantage of this "feature." AsicBoost, two researchers named Timo Hanke and Sergio Lerner figured out how to tweak existing ASICs so that they could operate 10-20% more efficiently. The invention was patented and available for manufacturers to add to their hardware. It was determined that the largest ASIC manufacturer, Bitmain, was using AsicBoost for their personal hardware and not sharing this efficiency gain with customers who purchased their equipment. After criticisms and controversy, Bitmain has come clean and released AsicBoost compatible firmware to their customers. Exploring open-source firmware for your mining hardware can help avoid issues such as these while also adding efficiencies and additional features to your Bitcoin (BTC) hardware.

A Trusted Real Cloud Mining Software – OXBTC Mining

Cloud mining has many advantages and disadvantages. For one, the user must trust the cloud provider in a space ripe with scams and frauds. The user is not in control of the equipment or how it is used. For those who are unfamiliar with technology and don't like trouble, cloud mining is a perfect solution. OXBTC Mining APP is developed by the OXBTC team on OXBTC Crypto Mining official site's oxbtc.com) cloud mining service. On the APP, you only need to perform simple operations and online monitoring of mining behavior and revenue. The technical problems of mining and the maintenance of mining machines will be completed in the background of OXBTC. The cloud mining functions of the OXBTC mining APP are very powerful, and it has six years of reputation and more than 910K users.

3rd party Mining Firmware

Some companies have found ways to "jailbreak" or unlock manufacturers' hardware and install custom firmware which allows for numerous benefits that we will explore later. While there are several larger mining farms running their own proprietary software there are limited public options for 3rd party firmware. Using open-source third-party firmware helps Bitcoin (BTC) stay decentralized as no single entity is being relied on for Bitcoin (BTC)'s security. We will explore the different options below.

Braiins OS+

The Braiins OS+ Firmware is developed by the same Europe-based team that created Slush Pool - the world's first and longest-standing Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool since 2010. Users of Slush Pool have collectively mined over 1.25 million Bitcoin (BTC) to date. Using Braiins OS+ firmware allows for greater customization of your hardware so that you can optimize your hardware(s) to match your preferences. This firmware also includes State-of-the-art autotuning optimization, which allows you to maximize hash rate and miner efficiency. Using the Braiins OS+ Autotuning feature, users can get an additional 10-25% efficiency improvement to their miners.

Software Pricing Best Feature

Braiins OS+0% if connected to SlushpoolStratum V2 MSK Miner0% if connected to Hiveon Pool. Amazing mobile app VnishFreeWide hardware support ASICseer~2-3%Custom interface Users using Braiins OS+'s Autotuning feature donate 2-2.5% of their hash rate to Braiins for a developer fee. This allows Braiins to capitalize off a portion of the efficiency gains and continue to operate their business, and develop firmware for more mining models.

The efficiency gains of their Autotuning feature greatly outweigh this devfee, making it a win-win for the customer and Braiins. Additionally, Braiins OS+ brings a bunch of additional features to your miners to maximize customization and uptime. As an added benefit, miners who choose to mine with Slushpool get a 0% pool fee. Supported Hardware Firmware from the Braiins team currently supports: Bitmain's Antminer S17 Antminer S17 Pro Antminer S17+ Antminer S17e Antminer T17 Antminer T17+ Antminer T17e Antminer S9i Antminer S9j Whatsminer M20S Antminer S19 support is planned for the near future.

MSK Miner

The MSK miner was developed by the Hive OS team based in Russia. This firmware offers a 0% pool fee and 0% transaction fee when connecting your Miner to their Hive on pool. They provide servers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Russia to ensure your ASICs remain close to their servers and operate at high efficiency.

Supported Hardware

Antminer S17 Antminer S17 pro Antminer S17e Antminer S17+ SoftwarePricingBest Feature Braiins OS+0% if connected to Slushpool Stratum V2 MSK Miner0% if connected to Hiveon Pool. Amazing mobile app VnishFreeWide hardware support ASICseer~2-3%Custom interface Varnish

Varnish is a large international mining Software development project with a highly technical team. Their first firmware was developed for the Antminer S9 and was later ported to ASIC miners from Whatsminer, Innosilicon, and Avalon. To date, their Software has been used on more than 1.5 million ASIC miners around the world. **Supported Hardware** Bitmain's Antminer S17 Antminer S17 Pro Antminer S17+ Antminer T17 Antminer T17 Pro Antminer T17+ Antminer S9 Antminer S9D Antminer T9+ AsicSeer

This firmware provider is relatively new to the mining landscape, as their first version was developed in October 2018. However, to date, their firmware is being utilized by over 60,000 ASICs worldwide. You can learn more about their firmware by visiting their website here.

Supported Hardware

Bitmain's Antminer S9, Antminer S9i, Antminer S9j, Antminer T9, Antminer T9+, Antminer T17, Antminer S17 Pro Planned support for all Bitmain SHA256 miners. Software Pricing Best Feature Braiins OS+0% if connected to Slushpool Stratum V2 MSK Miner0% if connected to Hiveon Pool. Amazing mobile app VnishFreeWide hardware support ASICseer~2-3%Custom interface Monitoring and Management Tools Once you have selected a firmware option that meets your needs, stock, or 3rd party, it is time to consider monitoring and management tools.

While this type of Software primarily benefits more significant mining operations, known as farms, they can also help people running a single miner. Monitoring and management tools are used to provide an overview of your mining operation. Using these tools allows you to quickly check the health of your operation, ensure that all miners are running optimally, and root cause issues if they are not. At a glance, you can check if any miners are offline, running too hot or not hashing efficiently. You can imagine how this becomes more useful with an increased number of miners.

Braiins OS+ Manager

Braiins OS+ Manager is a tool that works alongside Braiins OS+ firmware, as previously described. The tool allows miners to access all the great features of the Braiins firmware from anywhere in the world. By packaging your miners into different farms, miners can be monitored for troubleshooting, and mining configuration changes can be made on the fly from anywhere with an internet connection. If you wanted to change the settings of all of your Antminer S9's you could do so all at once with a few clicks.

Hive OS

Hive OS is the ultimate mining platform that allows users to set up, mine, and control processes more effectively and hassle-free across thousands of rigs, all from a single place. Everything you and your team need to do is to keep your farm at peak efficiency. Monitor your rigs from a single dashboard. Keep track of hashrate, online statuses, GPU errors, team activity, pool configurations, power consumption. Remote access from anywhere across the globe. Troubleshoot and reboot GPUs remotely or perform bulk updates across your entire farm.

The Minerstat

Minerstat offers a complete stack of solutions for crypto mining professionals. Monitor and manage all your mining machines from a single powerful dashboard. Optimize your efficiency, automate your mining, and drastically shorten the time spent on debugging and error handling. Access all critical historical and live mining data from the dashboard. Whether you're running ASIC machines or GPU rigs, minerstat has the Software for you.

Awesome Miner

Awesome Miner is a complete solution to manage and monitor mining operations. This tool is powerful for large-scale mining and can be used to optimize antminer firmware, maximize profits and minimize downtime. Firmware can improve performance by 10%, and the Awesome Miner tool allows you to profit switch coins based on real-time revenue and power consumption. Start mining within a minute with automatic pool setups.

Cudo Farm

Cudo Farm is an end-to-end solution that combines full metrics, stats, automation, intelligent decision making, forecasting, and complete management in one platform, creating improved efficiency and profits. Cudo's mining operating system CudoOS and optimized ASIC firmware provide the highest hash rates with the lowest power consumption in the industry. Gain maximum efficiency and profitability from your mining farm.

Titan

Titan Software makes mining more effortless and more profitable. Bring your entire mining facility online in minutes. Use powerful device management tools to save you time while Titan optimizes your performance and profitability.

Genesis Hexa

Genesis Hexa is an enterprise-grade mining management solution. It is THE All-In-One Software you need to build and operate massive mining farms. It enables quick and painless deployment, easy monitoring, and advanced reporting. Six years in the crypto industry are comparable to a lifetime in any other field. Having to figure out everything on our own in the middle of abruptly changing market conditions taught us invaluable lessons and made us industry leaders. We've packaged everything we know about building mining farms into Hexa, and soon it will be available for You as well.

Pooled Mining Protocols

Prior to mining pools, Bitcoin (BTC) mining required solo miners to connect and interact with the Bitcoin (BTC) protocol itself by running full nodes. By 2012, the network's protocol wasn't as capable as mining underwent radical changes and network hashrate grew exponentially. Accurate solo mining wasn't possible in the ASIC era: you need some sort of pool Software between your node (Bitcoin (BTC) Core) and miners, which constructs the blocks In late 2012, the Stratum V1 protocol was introduced as an evolution of the network protocol for Bitcoin (BTC) mining. Stratum V1 solved some of the growing pains that Bitcoin (BTC) mining was experiencing when it first became popular. Since the release of Stratum V1, it has been the standard protocol used during the past eight years and to this day by most pools. Despite its success, Stratum V1 has some shortcomings. Thus, many new improvements have been suggested over the years, which have led to the development of Stratum V2.

Stratum V2 is not yet supported by Bitcoin (BTC) Core but should be considered in the future as it improves the decentralization of the network while reducing data requirements when passing information between miners and mining pools. There was also a draft of the so-called Better Hash mining protocol by Matt Corallo - this protocol introduced the concept of miners selecting their own transactions (blocks). Work on this protocol was discontinued, and Matt became a co-author of the Stratum V2 mining protocol, which includes the custom work selection feature first proposed in Better Hash. See the complete pooled mining protocols comparison here.

Mining Bit-streams

ASIC miners are required to have operating Software that allows users to operate their Miner. This Software is also used to communicate with the pool. Miners will receive uncompleted work from the pool and, in return, submit back proof of work. Collections will then publish the block to the blockchain if a valid hash is found. In the early days of Bitcoin (BTC) mining, the standard open-source Software used by most GPU and FPGA miners was called CG miner.

CG Miner command line interface - the early days of mining Over time, certain parts of the open-source CG miner code began to disappear, and people were left with a half-functional Software to run their miners. People who had functioning Software kept it to themselves, and no development was made to fix bugs on CG miner. With the introduction of ASICs, manufacturers began shipping their miners with their own custom software. Due to Incidents such as ASIC Boost and Antbleed, people have lost trust in manufacturers' default Software. During this time, Braiins recognized the need to develop an open-source Software program that was free of bugs and maintained by industry experts. Hence, the BOS miner Software was born. Braiins OS (BOS miner) is an alternative to CG miner. It has been written from scratch in Rust and includes an implementation of Stratum V2.

And best of all, BOS miner is ultimately released now so that you can put it into action today!