So, since the bitcoin world — and worldwide financial world, if we're being honest — is falling apart (#936442), today seemed like a good day to play around with my fresh BMM101.

Running high on vertiguous hopium fumes late last year, I succumbed to the temptation (#579282, #652953) of getting one of these babies. In hindsight, I'd rather have the USD back... but if we're being honest, I probably would have just held it as BTC and then they'd be pretty lost as well. Fucking hopeless world. Now, then, I at least have a little piece of hardware to play with:

I just about resisted getting the BMM100 version on launch sale at BTC Prague last year, and perhaps that was lucky since this upgrade comes with Wi-Fi connection (=no need to fiddle with ugly cables).

It arrived a few weeks ago, but today we dove in:

It's flake-y, difficult to navigate/set up, and so far remarkably unreliable.

I mostly got it for educational purposes — and a nice thing to have on the bookshelf, next to my wonderful collection of (now worthless) Bitcoin books (#912367).

Being a tech dumbass (#850716) I of course ran straight into trouble; I restarted the set-up process three times — first, because the miner wouldn't sync with the Braiins website, second because I couldn't get the IP address to display (my error, there's a button on the back), and third because it stopped hashing. These sorts of stupid af failure notifications are wonderful... what tha fuck am I to do about that?!

The Braiins Hardware support group on TG is pretty useful for searching for error messages since obviously I'm not the first idiot to encounter this or that error.

What I'm really positively surprised by is that the fan, except for its occasional freak-outs, basically doesn't run. At 1 TH/s, the fan speed for the first 55 minutes was 13%; I can see the fan spinning but it's so silent that it doesn't make a sound. (Now and again, such as during the setup phase, the fan does spin up to maximum and creates quite some uncomfortable noise if you're sitting right next to it—as I am for the moment.)

It's not a good sign that the worker status page on Braiins says "disabled" even though everywhere else (on the machine, which is getting a little warm and so obviously is doing something; on the dashboard; on the pool accepted shares and "generated work" ticking up) the miner seems to be doing what it's supposed to do. Three things seem to turn themselves on and off without any rhyme or reason:

Just when I was about to post this, I spotted this little annoying line in one of the views:

Around the 1-hour mark, the poor thing started having seizures. Without any change in temperature or hashrate (they had both been stable for most of the first hour), the fan ramped up to 100% and the miner, then, screaming at me—at the level of about a quiet vacuum cleaner. This kept going for two-three minutes, while the hashrate went to zero and the screen displayed N/A info.

...and once the fan cooled off, the hashrate began climbing back up to around 1 TH/s. This repeated once or twice more, but hopefully — since it's still doing some kind of tuning (that lower right-hand corner has a purple pickaxe) — it's not a permanent thing.

And then, before you know it the dashboard is back to these silly "fail to fetch/fail to load" messages; the miner says "offline" but is clearly running (+ says 1.09 TH/s, and the fan is spinning), but the Braiins pool is registering work.

I have no idea.

The setup process, too, was a tad confusing, with several different spaces for usernames/miner names/passwords/pool addresses. Shit knows what goes where. My take-away recommendation for the Braiins team is to make this simple-ish process even freakin simpler; most people are idiots, OK—we don't want to fuck around with some tech shit we can't comprehend. Here's a revolutionary idea: just make shit that works.

The most annoying thing, like all things tech (hashtag cowboy-hat shitcoinery) is that I'm completely powerless when something goes wrong... now it says "offline" for whatever odd reason... Wi-Fi was working great all this time... and how do I troubleshoot it/fix it? fuck. knows.

If I ever get it to work, I might lottery mine with this cutie later, since at current electricity prices (actually, mostly network/utility fees) combined with ripping hashrate and collapsing USD and BTC, it's a pure loss. The miner does generate a little bit of heat, but nowhere near enough to make a difference in a normal-sized room, even in early spring (let alone Nordic mid-winter).

It'd be a lovely product if it worked, but so far it mostly just fucks about (offline/online; alive/dead, fan ramping up and/or starting hashrate off from zero).