Unfortunate turn of events. It appears the head of energy and mining at Braiins is now throwing insults at BIP-110.
I’m going to look for another alternative if one exists for renting hash. I could possible use Nicehash but I’m not sure if you can manual add a redirect to your own pool AND…Nicehash is a KYC platform.
What do you think @paul ?
I’m testing NiceHash now (will do a video once I get it working). It is KYC, so not a great replacement, but maybe still useful for the last stretch of the spam war here. For privacy minded folks, Braiins is the only good option I think.
Wow, NiceHash withholds your deposit until you do some “travel rule” crap to prove you own the wallet. Besides the expected message signing, it also requires providing them with your xPUB. To make that even remotely not stink and to avoid revealing all of your Bitcoin stack to them, you’d need to create a separate wallet that you use only for NiceHash and nothing else.
I see they accept deposits by lightning. I’ll check if that is a way around the travel rule rigamarole.
Lightning deposites also get withheld, but the requirement to resolve is a lot more reasonable than on-chain:
A simple checkbox (as opposed to message signing and giving away your xPUB for an on-chain deposite). Looks like the best option then with these clowns is to put your sats onto Lightning first, and deposite them from there. The fee rate is a little high for a Lightning invoice (I think because they turn around and swap them back to on-chain and charge you for it) but still better than the other option IMO.
I had done business with Nicehash 2-3 years ago. Had to KYC of course. I was renting hash for solo mining what I thought was btc but hidden in the terms somewhere was a clause that US citizens couldn’t be paid out in BTC but rather they gave you Litecoin.
I couldn’t believe it…and I blame myself for not being as vigilant as I am now. Funny thing to…when I kicked em to the curb I used “clowns” to describe them as well.
Me thinks in the immediate keep using the Braiins service. Sats is sats and hash is hash. It’s supported the plebs rally to BIP-110
I’m hooked into this service.
I’m looking into MiningRigRentals. Setup is simple and KYC free. However, the concept of how you rent the hash is different to Braiins (I can’t speak to NiceHashsing). You can withdraw your funds (at a cost) which is different to Braiins. Support is very responsive.
The actual rental of hash is not automated like in Braiins. You manually search for a miner who mines using the correct protocol (sha256-asicboost for bitcoin) and then find one who will sell you a specific amount of hash for a certain amount of hours. It’s way more ‘involved’ and needs a nice automation wrapper like Braiins.
They also have a fee of 3% I believe, so it’s not cheap if you rent small amounts of hash. More hash appears to be slightly cheaper as the miners can send you more of their hash and spread their costs.
You can rent small amounts (TH instead of PH) if you like.
Still investigating and will let you all know.
Braiins has been anti-BIP110 from the beginning. This new video from Matt is not surprising. Just spend some time in their Telegram chat and you’ll quickly realize that not only are they anti-BIP110 but they also have a centralized exchange mentality in their privacy policy where they hold your personally identifiable information (including IP) for longer than they need to (indefinitely). I figured all of this out when Hashpower first came on my radar but used them anyways because there aren’t any real alternatives that I could find without having to sacrifice other things. Honestly, I was surprised that they didn’t withhold this Hashpower service until after the BIP110 activation in order to avoid BIP110ers from signaling using their hash. Don’t be surprised if once BIP110 activates they pause the hashpower service as part of their way of preventing BIP110 blocks from being mined.
It should also be noted that the current price for fillable hashpower has been much higher than the hashprice for the past few days and as such, my bid has been sitting unfulfilled because I refuse to overspend by too much for hashrate. Not sure what’s driving this price up, maybe it’s fellow BIP110ers jumping on or something else. I did notice that one bid is using 1.5EH/s which is half of the available hash the Braiins is providing so that may be it. Wonder who that person is and which side he’s on 
EDIT: Here’s a screenshot of the past few days. Notice how the “fillable” price has shot up while the “hashprice” has remained the same.
MiningRigRentals.com shows it has 53 Eh/s available for rent (a much larger pool of hashrate than Braiins Hashpower):
We could try to build a broker service of some type on top of it to abstract away the manual interactions. The biggest issue is if it is done as a centralized website, then it would be a prime target for government types to hit you with violations of some obscure financial regulations etc. We’d need to figure out how to build a peer-to-peer completely decentralized system so there isn’t one entity to target. I’ll give this some thought. Would like to hear others’ ideas.
They do have API access of course. I was planning to build something around that, a middle man to decide when to buy and at what cost. Will need some thinking all right.
So far, I’m seeing various levels of completion from different rigs - some at 95% of purchased hash, others at 60% - so even after buying the hashrate, you’re not guaranteed a steady rate. Manual comms with the rig owner and then escalation to the MRR site is needed to request refunds when the contracted rate isn’t delivered. There’s a lot to think through.
I’m happy to meet and run through some scenarios with you Paul. I’ll need a day or so to review the APIs and put together some suggestions on algorithms.
However, to deploy this to everyone, we’d need to package it up in an app I guess, rather than a centralised website.
Definitely, please ping me when you have time to meet to discuss. I suppose if it is divisible enough for an individual to have optionality on a range of hash rates, then there wouldn’t need to be a pooling of users to smooth it out.
I’d like to steal a lot of ideas from @remco 's Hashrate Autopilot to incorporate into the app. If there are simple manual communications that are frequent enough, we could even build in a super light-weight agent model like Qwen Bonsai 27B 1-bit to help automate those as well on behalf of the user.
