The Bitcoin Mining Field Manual is a free, openly-published reference to how Bitcoin ASIC mining actually works — from the silicon up to the power bill. It is the readable companion to D-Central’s open mining data layer: where the datasets give you the numbers, the Field Manual gives you the picture they fit into.

We are publishing it the way we wish a mining handbook had existed when we started fixing miners in 2016: web-native (every chapter links the live tool or dataset that proves it), versioned (this is Edition 1, dated and revisable, not a frozen PDF), and vendor-neutral (it explains the ecosystem, it does not sell you one firmware). Every technical claim is cross-checked against the Bitcoin Mining Hack Bible — our internal 110-document research corpus — and tagged so it can be audited.

Edition 1 is being written in public. Some chapters below are fully fleshed out today; the rest are stubs with the live tools already linked, so the manual is useful immediately and gets deeper every week. We would rather ship an honest, growing reference than sit on a “complete” one.

On whose shoulders this stands

None of this knowledge is ours alone. The Field Manual exists because of the people who opened up Bitcoin mining before us: skot9000 and the open-source Bitaxe / ESP-Miner / AxeOS community and Open Source Miners United (OSMU), who proved a single person can build and run an open ASIC miner; Braiins, who shipped open firmware and runtime autotuning on real Antminers and authored Stratum V2; Luxor, who gave the industry the word “hashprice”; the CGMiner lineage (and its BMMiner fork) that every ASIC mining daemon descends from; and the OEMs — Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan — whose hardware we spend our days taking apart. Where this manual is right, credit them. Where it is wrong, that is on us, and you can tell us so.

The chapters

Edition 1 · eight chapters · last reviewed June 2026.

Chapter 1 — Fundamentals (in progress, Edition 1)

What hashing is, why ASICs exist, the difference between solo and pool mining, and how an order of “terahashes per second at joules per terahash” turns into sats. Start with these while the chapter fills in:

• How to start Bitcoin mining in 2026: the complete beginner’s guide
• D-Central Mining Academy — the structured learning path from beginner to expert
• Solo Bitcoin mining: the complete guide to lottery mining
• The mining glossary — every term defined and citable

Chapter 2 — Silicon: the ASIC chips (fully fleshed)

The bottom of the stack. Every Antminer’s hashrate, efficiency and behavior come down to which mining ASIC is on its boards, how many of them there are, and how they are wired into voltage domains. Read the full chapter below ↓

Chapter 3 — Hashboards (in progress, Edition 1)

How chips become boards: the chain-of-ASICs topology, the 18-pin ribbon interface, voltage domains and DC-DC converters, and how a board fails. Until the full chapter lands, these are the live references:

• ASIC fault finder & error-code database — what a fault means and where it is
• Canaan Avalon hashboard repair (component-level reality)
• Hashboard testers in ASIC repair

Chapter 4 — Firmware (fully fleshed)

Stock vs custom firmware, what autotuning actually does, dev fees, open-source reality, and where Stratum V2 stands. This is the chapter the mining internet gets wrong most often. Read the full chapter below ↓

Chapter 5 — Pools & protocols (in progress, Edition 1)

How your miner talks to the world: Stratum V1 and V2, solo vs pooled, payout schemes, and the protocol mechanics. Live references while this fills in:

• Firmware comparison matrix — protocol support per firmware (vendor-neutral)
• Solo mining and the lottery math
• Glossary: Stratum, share, difficulty, payout schemes

Chapter 6 — Economics (in progress, Edition 1)

Hashprice (the term Luxor gave the industry), break-even, electricity cost, difficulty and the realistic life of a machine. The live tools already answer most of this:

• Live ASIC profitability leaderboard — daily profit, break-even, reliability
• Used & refurbished ASIC price index (CAD)
• Mining profitability calculator

Chapter 7 — Repair (in progress, Edition 1)

The part almost nobody documents: how miners actually fail, how to diagnose at the component level, and what it costs to fix versus replace. This is D-Central’s home turf — a repair bench since 2016. Live references:

• ASIC fault finder — 650+ error codes mapped to causes
• ASIC reliability & failure-mode index — what actually fails
• D-Central repair bench — component-level service
• Multimeter guide for ASIC repair

Chapter 8 — Power & heat (in progress, Edition 1)

PSUs, North American 120V vs 240V, circuit sizing, and the truth that a miner is a space heater that earns sats. Live references:

• North American 120V & 240V power guide
• ASIC power-profiles database — the efficiency envelope per model
• APW12 PSU repair & diagnostics
• Space-heater BTU calculator

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Chapter 2 — Silicon: the ASIC chips

Everything a Bitcoin miner does begins with one part: the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that computes SHA-256 double hashes and nothing else. A modern Antminer is, functionally, a few hundred of these chips, fed power and clock, wired into boards, and cooled. If you understand the chip, you understand 80% of the machine’s behavior — its hashrate, its efficiency, and how it fails.

The chips that matter (Bitmain Antminer line)

Each generation of Antminer is defined by its mining ASIC. The headline numbers below are per-chip hashrate and full-chip efficiency in joules per terahash (lower is better).

Chip	Hashrate / chip	Efficiency	Voltage domains	Used in
BM1387	~75 GH/s	98 J/TH	21	S9, T9+
BM1391	~111 GH/s	57 J/TH	12	S15, T15
BM1397	~166–200 GH/s	40–55 J/TH	12	the entire S17/T17 generation
BM1398	~90 GH/s	29.5 J/TH	38	S19 family
BM1366	~100 GH/s	21.5 J/TH	—	S19 XP, S19K Pro; Bitaxe Ultra
BM1368	600–750 GH/s	17.5 J/TH	12	S21, T21; Bitaxe Supra
BM1370	~750+ GH/s	15 J/TH	13	S21 Pro, S21 XP, S21+; Bitaxe Gamma

Two corrections this manual exists to make. First, the entire S17/T17 generation (S17, S17 Pro, T17, S17+, T17+, S17e, T17e) uses the 7 nm BM1397 — not “BM1393,” which is a named-only inferred S9j variant that the internet keeps mis-attributing to the S17. Second, the open-source Bitaxe boards map cleanly to Bitmain silicon: Bitaxe Ultra = BM1366, Bitaxe Supra = BM1368, Bitaxe Gamma = BM1370.

Chips, boards and voltage domains

A chip never works alone. On a hashboard, chips are wired in a series chain and grouped into voltage domains: a domain is a set of chips that share one DC-DC converter and therefore one supply voltage. This is the single most-misunderstood fact in mining hardware, so the manual states it plainly:

Voltage is set per DOMAIN, not per chip. You cannot dial in a single chip’s voltage independently — a group of chips shares a converter. What firmware can set per chip is frequency. So “per-chip frequency, per-domain voltage” is the correct model, and any source claiming “per-chip voltage control” is wrong.

Board topology varies by model, and the differences are not cosmetic — they change everything downstream:

Model	Chip	Chips / board	Domains / board	Chips / domain
S19	BM1398	76	38	2
S19 Pro	BM1398	114	38	3
S21 / T21	BM1368	108	12	9
S21 XP	BM1370	91	13	7

Note the trap the Field Manual exists to close: the S19 has 76 chips per board while the S19 Pro has 114 — same chip, different board, very different machine. Confusing the two is the most common spec error in S19-era content.

And one more: the S21 has no PIC chip. The PIC microcontroller (used for power sequencing and a heartbeat) lived on S19-and-earlier boards; the S21 generation dropped it.

The control board (the miner’s brain)

Separate from the hashboards is the control board: the small computer that runs the firmware, talks to the pool, and drives the hashboards. Its platform determines what custom firmware is even possible:

Platform	CPU	Notable detail	Models
Xilinx Zynq-7010	Dual Cortex-A9 @ 667 MHz + Artix-7 FPGA	SD-card bootable (J3 jumper); the most recoverable platform	S9, S15, S17
BeagleBone (BBB)	TI AM335x Cortex-A8	No FPGA (software)	S19j, S19j Pro (late 2021+)
Amlogic S905	Quad Cortex-A53	—	S19 XP, newer S19
CV1835 (CVitek)	Dual Cortex-A53	—	S21, T21

The Zynq clock is 667 MHz — not 700, not 650, a number worth getting right because it is the platform DCENT_OS targets first (its SD-card recoverability is why).

Go deeper: the live ASIC chip reference and the universal ASIC miner spec database (560+ models) carry the full structured data behind this chapter; the Mining API serves it as JSON.

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Chapter 4 — Firmware

Firmware is the software that runs on the control board: it talks to the pool, drives the hashboards, and decides how hard to push the chips. Stock Antminer firmware works, but it is locked down and tuned conservatively. Custom firmware exists to do three things stock will not: tune for efficiency, expose control, and (in some cases) be open enough to audit. This is also the corner of mining where misinformation is thickest, so this chapter sticks to verified facts and credits the projects that built the field.

What autotuning actually does

The headline feature of every serious custom firmware is the autotuner. Here is the fact people miss: an autotuner does not load a table of “presets.” It derives frequency and per-domain voltage at runtime, measuring the board’s actual behavior to hit a target (a hashrate, a power draw, or an efficiency) and adapting as silicon ages and temperature changes. Calling autotuner outputs “presets” is the tell of a source that does not understand the mechanism. Braiins is widely credited with proving runtime autotuning on production Antminers; the open community has built on that idea since.

Dev fees: ranges, not single numbers

A “dev fee” is hashrate the firmware donates to its developer for a slice of each interval. Quoting a single flat number is usually wrong — most fees are ranges that depend on the features in use:

Firmware	Dev fee	Note
Stock (Bitmain)	0%	No custom features
BraiinsOS+	2–2.5%	A range — not a flat 2% or 2.5%
VNish	2–2.8%	Range depends on features used
LuxOS	2.8%	Fixed rate
DCENT_OS (target)	0% default	User-configurable donation; closed beta — see status

“Open source” is a spectrum, not a checkbox

“Open-source firmware” is claimed loosely. The accurate picture: BraiinsOS+ is partially open. Braiins open-sourced the BCB100 control board (full hardware + firmware, a genuine and generous contribution to the field), but the BOSminer mining daemon and the boser binary are not open source, and neither is the web UI. BOSminer itself is notable engineering — written from scratch in Rust as async crates rather than a CGMiner fork. VNish and LuxOS are proprietary and closed-source. So when a source says a firmware is “fully open source,” check which components they mean — usually it is the board, not the miner.

DCENT_OS’s stated target is fully open (GPL-3.0), but it is closed beta and experimental today, on the Antminer S9 family only — we will not call it “open source firmware you can run” until there is a public image. See the honest DCENT_OS status.

Stratum V2: who actually ships it

Stratum V2 is the next-generation mining protocol — binary, encrypted, with job declaration that lets miners choose their own work. It was authored by Braiins (with Bitcoin protocol contributors), and among third-party Antminer firmwares, only BraiinsOS+ ships native Stratum V2 as of 2026. VNish and LuxOS do not. If a source claims another firmware “supports Stratum V2,” treat it as an error until proven on a live build.

Choosing firmware (vendor-neutral)

The right firmware depends on your hardware, your electricity, and how much control you want. Rather than push one, the Field Manual points you to the neutral comparison and lets the data decide:

• Firmware comparison matrix 2026 — BraiinsOS+ vs VNish vs LuxOS, feature by feature
• Antminer firmware compatibility matrix — which firmware supports which model
• Firmware update guide — every model, every method
• DCENT_OS — D-Central’s own open-source firmware (closed beta, experimental, S9 family)

How to use this manual

Read it as a map, not a novel. Each chapter answers one layer of the question “what makes a Bitcoin miner do what it does,” and links the live tool that lets you act on it. Cite it freely — every fleshed claim carries a Bible verification tag so you can check our work. If you find an error, that is the manual doing its job: tell us on Discord and we will fix it and date the revision.

FAQ

Is the Field Manual free?

Yes. It is free to read on the web, openly published, and updated in place. There is no paywall and no download gate.

Is it finished?

No — and it says so. This is Edition 1, written in public. Chapters 2 (Silicon) and 4 (Firmware) are fully fleshed out; the other six are stubs with the live tools already linked, filling in over the weeks. We publish honestly rather than wait for “complete.”

How do I know the facts are right?

Every technical claim is cross-checked against the Bitcoin Mining Hack Bible, D-Central’s internal research corpus, and tagged inline so it can be audited. Where the mining internet and the Bible disagree, the Bible wins — and we note the correction.

Can I cite or quote it?

Yes, please do. Attribute it to D-Central and link the chapter. The structured data behind several chapters is available as free, openly-licensed datasets on the open mining data hub.

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Bitcoin Mining Field Manual, Edition 1. Last reviewed June 2026. Published free by D-Central, Laval, Quebec — a Bitcoin ASIC repair bench since 2016 — on the shoulders of skot9000 / OSMU, Braiins, Luxor, the CGMiner lineage, and the OEMs whose hardware we take apart. One more layer decentralized: the knowledge layer.