Bitmain, a mining hardware giant of China, has released a batch of Antminer products with a particularly high failure rate.
On May 1, it has been reported that the Telegram group, started by Arseniy Grusha, the Co-founder of United States-based cryptocurrency consulting and mining firm Wattum, contains several complaints about Bitmain products, primarily the Antminer S17+.
On May 4, Grusha wrote on his LinkedIn page:
“I have never seen such defective production before. In case you have a similar problem, I have created a telegram group where you can share your experience with the latest deliveries of these miners.”
However, Grusha explained that his company received 420 Antminer S17+ devices in March after a month-long delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bitmain’s Antminer S17+ model is said to have a failure rate of up to 30%, according to a group of disappointed customers https://t.co/MrlFGOr05Z — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) May 5, 2020
According to him, around 30% of the machines started troubling after only one month of use. Grusha noted that normally, defective miners account for just 5-7% of the whole order.
According to Grusha, among the units, 32 stopped working due to ‘ERROR_SOC_INIT’ error, while 99 now only work using just one or two hashboards out of three, with 80% of the latter group ostensibly having this problem straight out of the box.
Likewise, he clarified that all of the purchased miners have been using the latest official software from Bitmain:
“Part of the miners just stopped working. The other part have bad hashboards and their power is lower by 30 and 60%.”
As per the report, he has already contacted Bitmain, who apparently appointed him a specialist and new firmware.
Grusha said:
“Will have results in couple days.”
He added:
“But we still have 32% of bad units. They should be sent to China, and as a result, we lost money on mining before [the] halving and will [have to] wait two months for repair, which of course does no good for us.”
After he was asked whether he was considering going to court, Grusha replied:
“I sent a request for compensation, and asked to send new miners instead of the bad miners. Let’s see what they answer first.”
In addition, other members in the group, which boasts almost 140 members after being created on May 1, reported similar failure rates.
Mike Hamilton, the Chief Technology Officer at Griid, the New York-based energy startup, said:
“We’ve got about 700/1800 machines with at least 1 hashboard down after 3 months. About 300/1800 with at least 2 hashboards down, and probably 150/1800 with all 3 hashboards and/or PSU failures.”
Matt D’Souza, the CEO at Blockware Mining, recalled having a 19% defective rate after deploying a thousand Antminer S17+ units in a hosting facility based on freight containers, as he got a much lower defective rate of 2% after launching another 1250 of the same model miners at a different facility.
However, in April, Samson Mow, the Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream, the blockchain infrastructure firm, tweeted that Bitmain customers have a 20-30% failure rate with Antminer S17/T17 units. Mow also wondered that Jihan Wu, the CEO of Bitmain, blames ousted co-founder Jihan Wu for the problems and “is begging customers to give the S19 a chance.”
As it has been reported previously, Antminer S19 was designed to produce increased mining output after the Bitcoin halving, which will make it more difficult to mine new coins.
Thus, Bitmain sold out its first round of domestic Antminer S19 sales within 24 hours, while the units would not be shipped until May 11 at the earliest, which is roughly the same day the halving occurs.
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Bitcoin News