#002 JL Zoeckler - Crypto Mining Tools Podcast

We talk with JL Zoeckler from the Beard Miner crypto mining co-op in Ohio is also a professor who teaches creativity & entrepreneurship at Miami University.

Transcription

Scott: Welcome to the second Crypto Mining Tools podcast ever. And today we have our guest JL. I’m not even going to try to pronounce his last name. JL, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how to pronounce your last name.

JL: Yeah, hi, JL Zeckler. You know some names don’t make it over through Ellis Island very easily and mine was one of those. I’ve been a miner ever since the end of 2017, 2018. So I’ve experienced a couple ups and downs but I’m still in the game, and I think that’s why we get to talk because I survived.

Scott: Nice. And today our co-host is Ethan Zerkaa.

Ethan: Hi everybody. Ethan Zerkaa here.

Scott: Good morning.

Ethan: I actually have the very distinct pleasure of knowing JL personally. And I’ve been over to his mining farm, and some fascinating things. I’ve really learned a lot of fascinating things going to your farm, JL. One of the things that I would really like the viewers to know about, or the listeners I should say, is about your farm and we’re in a time now where it’s very difficult and it’s a struggle to keep mining, but you found very unique and innovative ways to keep your gear running, to keep it profitable either by loading new operating systems, or specialized tuning. Could you please tell us a bit more about that?

JL: Yeah, for sure. Most of the innovations that I’ve had to implement have come out of necessity. So I had the pleasure of buying graphics cards when they were very unavailable and you had to pay top dollar for them. So I remember paying $500 for an AMD card and I was thrilled at the price. I thought $500 was sweet, because I plugged that into whattomine.com.

Ethan: We’ve all been there.

JL: And I was going to make so much money on Ethereum, and then quickly things dropped. I had to figure out, “Well no one’s buying this equipment right now. I can’t just liquidate it. And I really love mining and I believe longterm in cryptocurrency. So how do I stay involved?” And the more I got into threads online and started tinkering with the equipment, it turns out you can make these things run a lot more efficient and you can stop worrying about, “Well how Ethereum am I’m making,” but, “How much Ethereum am I keeping every month?”

Scott: So you’re a tinkerer then. You-

JL: I am. I was building my first computer when I was 12, so it was so natural for me to grab motherboards and start slapping things on it and it brought me back to those early days.

Scott: What coins are you mining right now?

JL: So today at the farm I mining Beam with the graphics cards that I have there still. I’m mining Bitcoin. That’s the bulk of my mining. And then I am, day by day, deciding whether to plug in or unplug my light coin miners. So that’s been a wild ride over the last six months. So that’s my main mining now. But even today, my main focus is how much coin am I keeping at the end of the month? Not what is my terra hash look like, but what do I get to keep at the end of the month when I pay some bills. That’s where you start getting a lot more real in this game when you start looking at, “hey, I’m not just mining on a couple of graphics cards.” I have 586 running now so that electricity bill is not small.

Scott: Yeah. And so where, where are you pointing those, those Bitcoin miners at right now? What pool?

JL: Well, I have been on a couple of different pools and there’s some great ones out there. Recently got introduced to Nova Block and I think they’re relatively new, but they’ve been solid and they’re here in North America, which is nice. And yeah, I got to meet a couple of people that are working there and building and it’s just been a seamless transition over to them.

Scott: Yeah. Well I think you have something to say about Nova Block, don’t you?

Ethan: Yeah, I mean, for those of you who don’t know, Nova Block launched back in August 2019, and within four months they become one of the top 15 public mining pools worldwide. And their goal is to decentralize the hash rate with a focus on North America and they believe that as mining shifts from China, North America will be the leading mining pool provider in the industry. And so that’s why Nova Block wants to change the landscape with the increased transparency and educate customers on what the best type of pool for their needs. So it’s a really great company.

JL: Yeah. I mean it’s been awesome.

Scott: So Nova Block, yeah, they are sponsoring this episode just to be transparent and they have an exclusive offer until January 20th, you can get a reduction down to 1.8% pool fee if you use the invitation code OFFORD18 so that’s O-F-F-O-R-D one eight, and-

Ethan: All caps.

Scott: All caps, yes. So you could go to Novablock.com and you can talk to Vincent, the Vincent at Nova Block, and you can check out their money pool.

JL: Yeah. Yeah, that was great. Does that mean if I type in OFFORD15 I might get a 1.5 pool fee?

Scott: Maybe, maybe.

JL: Maybe I’m the only one that messes with offer codes to see if I can get a better deal.

Ethan: Only you JL. That’s what I love about you is you’re always thinking out of the box and how can I save just that little bit more. That’s what makes you a great miner.

JL: No thanks.

Scott: What are some of these tricks then that you’re using to stay profitable?

JL: Yeah, I mean one of them is what you track and what you look at is what helps you make these decisions. So watts per terahash and how much does it cost to make a Bitcoin are the things I’m tracking day to day. So I was just talking with someone that wants to put in, 30 or 50 more S17s into my space and have me host them. And the main thing I’m talking to that person about is, well there’s a lot of different options with some of the firmwares, the custom firmwares that are out there. There’s a lot of different ways we can run this. You can focus on just getting as much Bitcoin every month as possible, but you’re also spending a lot more on electricity to do that. So I walked him through some of the experiments I’ve ran with this custom firmware.

JL: And I find that there are, Telegram is now where I spend an enormous amount of my time daily. It used to be on the various forums on Reddit, but it’s really telegram. Learning about different firmwares that are out there trying and testing them, seeing what results I really get. So the biggest thing that I’ll do is, ake some suggestions on, how can I customize an S17 for instance, and then plug it into my metered PDU and see, is that what it’s really getting?

JL: And often it’s not. Often you’re getting different results. So now I’m tinkering with it. I have my S17 currently running at 65 terahash, 2,700 Watts. It’s about 42 Watts per terahash. With my electricity. That’ll make a Bitcoin for $2,700 which is reasonable. That means anything over, as long as Bitcoin stays over 2,700 I’m still profitable with that machine.

Scott: Yeah. And I know you’re really big on knowing those exact numbers, how much it’s going to cost me to make a Bitcoin.

JL: Yeah. Because I’m a small farmer. I don’t have money behind me. I don’t have a large investment. So this next month for me to stay in business, I have to stick to those rules. And I found that that also keeps me from making some of the dumber decisions I made early on. Like, now I won’t buy equipment unless I fully understand how am I going to get my money back out of this and how much profit should I expect. And I’m a lot more conservative, you know? Yes, I think Bitcoin’s going to get to 50,000 and 100,000, but I want to still be mining while we get there. I don’t want to be out of the game when we finally get there, you know?

Scott: So it’s not 100% FOMO now, it’s just a little bit of FOMO.

JL: Just a little bit, just a little bit. You know, I still believe this is the biggest technology shift we’re going to see. The internet was the big one that I didn’t capitalize on and as this was coming around I thought, oh I’m not missing it this time.

Ethan: You mentioned that when you first got into this, you couldn’t have bought at a worst time. And from those lessons, because it sounds like you’ve learned a lot of lessons. What advice would you give to people getting into the market? When do you feel as the best time to buy? I mean other than just having figured out how you’re going to get your return on investment.

JL: Yeah, I mean I think about, right now we’re in a moment that I was waiting for. So I have been buying up a lot of equipment over the last three months. What I learned was when people aren’t excited, when there is actually stock sitting at Bitmain or somewhere else and it’s not sold out, it means there isn’t such a high demand that the price might be out of line with what you can expect for results.

JL: So I look at a moment when everyone’s not excited about expanding and think that’s probably an opportunity and then I just run the math. The other thing that keeps me really honest now that I would suggest is you really got to run the math with conservative numbers. What if Bitcoin doesn’t go up as we go through the havening? Will you be profitable on the other side of that? You got to you have to look in the mirror and be honest with yourself. If Bitcoin doesn’t shoot up, if it doesn’t double in price, are you okay or does that mean you’re filing bankruptcy or selling all your equipment off? Because you’ll be pretty disappointed in that moment. So that’s part of it.

Ethan: So talk about doing the numbers and doing the calculations. How do you do those numbers? You have a calculator on your computer or your phone?

JL: That the exact same question, well this is perfect because-

Ethan: Do you have a spreadsheet or-

JL: You guys have made for me the most useful tool that I found yet, and I have a bunch of spreadsheets where you can just make these algorithms, but the tools you guys have put online I have now been using, because you did that one thing that’s difficult for me to do manually, which is build in the havening to your results. So now looking at what are my results over the next year, those are so much more accurate because you guys have built in the effect of the havening to those results. And then I play with things like, well, difficulty is going to rise, so how much, I don’t know exactly, but I will typically plug in at least 1% a week as a difficulty rising factor.

Ethan: What’s one thing that we could change about the cryptomining.tools website. What’s something that might make a little bit more useful for you?

JL: Oh well certainly if there were just an API that tied directly to my panel, I mean that’d make it real easy. You can just take my existing equipment and tell me exactly where I’m at right now. But anyone that’s running a farm knows their own metrics pretty quickly.

Ethan: You hope.

JL: You hope. Yeah, that’s true. I suppose, I don’t know how many people are running the various custom firmwares that are out there, but having a factor where you could say using [vinishes 00:10:53] turbo mode where it’s doing 78 terahash is at 3,700 Watts. What do my S17s look like? Because there are some standard numbers out there that you could probably pull in. That’d be neat. Just see what, and that’s introducing people to the various firmwares that are out there at the same time.

Scott: Right?

Ethan: Yeah. So I’m in the process of developing the 2.0 I wanted to make sure that we had the ability to put in custom parameters. So hopefully that’ll help fill in that gap for you.

JL: Yeah. You know, the other thing is, when I’m using the tool, I constantly have to have a calculator window open because I need to say, “oh what if I acquire 900 S17s, what if I run them at this and this. Maybe there’s an easy way to build in a calculator right in the platform so I don’t have to leave to another app or another window.

Ethan: Like a multiplier basically.

JL: Totally, because I’m just doing basic math the whole time I’m using that tool. It’s be cool if it was just built right in, that’d be neat.

Ethan: Awesome. Awesome idea. So you seem like an entrepreneur yourself, but you also teach entrepreneurship.

JL: I do. And I thought I was going to be a teacher. You know, when I was a kid, when I grew up I thought I’d be a teacher, but that only realized at 40. I have done everything but teaching up until now. Yeah, I was out in San Francisco and I am constantly, for better for worse, starting companies and getting involved with other people. You know, it’s one of those, you know you’re an entrepreneur if even when you’ve tried to avoid it, you keep starting companies or you keep joining other people.

JL: So I was out in San Francisco and these college students came and visited from Miami University of Ohio and they were really impressive students and I was just teaching them stuff about marketing and consulting at the time and I tried to hire a few of them coming out of that summer visit and the professor told me they were sophomores in college. I thought they were graduating seniors so it was like, “well I need to know more about whatever this program is. And it’s funny now because I work in that program and I teach the classes that they were going through, but they learn every freshman at the business school at Miami in Ohio has to take a class in creativity, has to take a class in programming.

JL: Just standard business tools you’ll need no matter what you do. And I love it. And I really, my class is an opportunity to really shake people up. So I’ve got finance and accounting majors mainly and I’m teaching them about creativity. Imagine how that ruffles their feathers.

Scott: Do you work crypto into that any?

JL: I do, I do. I was doing a meeting with a couple students virtually and I said, “hey, you guys want to actually see my warehouse?” And I just walked in on FaceTime and they were just like, “what is that? What are all those green lights? Why does it sound like there’s cicadas everywhere in your warehouse?” Yeah, I do. Because I talk about, especially for an accountant, good luck if you don’t think you need to be creative. Right now the rules change every three to six to nine months. And there’s only a few accountants right now that I found that really have a handle on what’s going on with cryptocurrency. How to, you know, I got Bitcoin deposited this morning, from my mining results from yesterday.

JL: It’s not simple to decide how to treat that cost basis and a year from now when my taxes are finally filed, how much did I make or lose or, that not simple. Yeah.

Scott: So long as you’re not teaching them to be too creative.

JL: They always hear it that way the first time. “Like, no, no, no, we’re not supposed to be creative.” I mean “no, no, no, how you represent this information isn’t standard. There’s five different ways to represent this.” But yes, you’re right. You don’t want to be creative in the wrong way.

Ethan: Is there any key or secret you impart with students that you’ve found to just be a secret to success? Is it perseverance is doggedness?

JL: Is it’s interesting, these are really competitive. Miami runs a very competitive business school, so they’re very competitive. I asked them in one of my classes about a month ago, how many of you played competitive sports all the way through high school and it was like 95% of the students. So there’s no lack of effort or grit or hustle with them. But they’re scared of failing. They’re deathly afraid of failing. And it’s one of the biggest things that’s in the way of them being creative because you’ll go with what you know if you’re scared of failing. It’s also one of the biggest things that’s going to keep them from doing something new and unique.

JL: So the biggest thing in this class is how can I help them have an experience of trying something new, becoming a little bit more resilient to fail because you’re going to fail. There’s no doubt, it’s how you respond to it. And each time they do that, they become a little less scared to try something new. And that’s it. That’s success for me is if I can get them and we do it in the classroom and we have an exercise, an assignment where they have to go out and fail three times on purpose, something ridiculous.

Ethan: I think that’s awesome.

JL: Like call their parents and ask them if they can buy a car or something that’s high stakes and they can’t, they can’t tell the person that they’re pretending. But it’s the only way. It’s why as you get older you get a little more comfortable with failure because you just had to, you know.

Ethan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that’s, I couldn’t agree with you more. Learning how to deal with failure and not be a victim of it, but a survivor through it and learning that you’re going to fall down but hey, you can always get back up. You can brush yourself off and you can keep going. I think that is a very, very important vital life skill to have.

JL: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think about, it’s really relevant to the mining farm that I’m running right now. So I acquired this, we started working on this deal in, I want to say April or May finally closed it end of July. The difficulty of Bitcoin changed substantially in that period of time and had I fully seen that coming, well I didn’t see a bump to 13,000 happening, that threw off my whole plan. That got everyone way too, I wanted to acquire everything and run it for a while and then have everyone get excited again about Bitcoin. I didn’t want it to happen that way.

JL: So by the time I’m done closing the deal, I own a bunch of S9s that are barely profitable and as the difficulty goes up, running them in any kind of standard way won’t be profitable at all, here in Cincinnati. If you’ve got 2 cent power, sure they’re still profitable no matter what you’re doing with them. But that’s not what I have. So in the last month I have figured out how to get these machines to a max efficiency. So they’re running now at about 74 Watts per terahash and it’s two S9s are running off of one PSU. So that also conserves a lot of space on my shelves and those PSUs are valuable. I can liquidate those and make back some of the money. So it’s that kind of, you know, I either could have given up and just liquidated everything. Like, shoot, I shouldn’t have made this deal. I shouldn’t have bought this warehouse full of machines. I guess I’ll just cut my losses and walk away or is there another way? And just keep asking that question.

Ethan: That’s the thing. Yeah. If you can make it right now, and figure out all these things, then when the going gets good, it’s only going to be that much better for you.

JL: Exactly. Exactly. And this allows me to survive long enough to get to the next round of equipment change over. That’s what I’m working on now. How quickly can I now get this warehouse flipped over to newer equipment so I can run for the next three to five years. You know, I don’t think, S9s, I don’t think I’m going to have S9s in a couple of years, but I’m going to keep using them until I can’t, you know?

Ethan: So tell us a little bit more about, you call it a co-op?

JL: Yeah. Yeah. So when I started this whole thing, I had shut down a GP warehouse in California and I had brought everything with me, got to Ohio and that was my unplugging moment where I said, “well I have to move. I’m not going to plug these back in until I figured out how to be more profitable with them.” And while they were unplugged, ended up with this warehouse. And one of the things that I keep thinking about outside of, how do I make money at this warehouse is how can I participate in helping other people get into crypto? Like this is better for all of us the more people that understand. I’ve got my family covered, my daughters right now take their allowance in Bitcoin or Ethereum or Bitcoin cash.

Ethan: That is so awesome.

JL: When my oldest daughter comes back from babysitting, she’ll say, where’s Bitcoin at right now? So yesterday she came back and I said, “hey, Bitcoins dipping right at about 7,000,” and she said, “great, I’ll put my $100 in now. Can you facilitate?” You know, when Bitcoin quick jumped up to 10,005, what was that about a month ago when I should’ve liquidated so that I could pay bills and didn’t? I don’t do this perfect. And I think, Ethan, you were telling me to even do it. I don’t make every right decision, but she was trying to figure out how to get on Coinbase pro so that she could-

Ethan: She could liquidate?

JL: So she could liquidate and then buy back.

Ethan: And then buy back.

JL: She has no intention of not being in Bitcoin, I’m like, you’re 16 this is amazing. So I want more people to do that. And I thought most Bitcoin miners are trying to stay secret. They don’t want anybody, they’re trying to keep the giant fans on the outside of their facility. They’re trying to make it so no one even knows what those are.

JL: And I thought, what if I just did this different? What if I just challenge that assumption that we should stay secret? What if I just let people walk through? What if I just take that risk on? Sure. Someone might load a virus onto my network. Very unlikely. Someone might steal some of my S9s. Oh, well, I’ll get more. They’re not very expensive. I realized I think I will enjoy this, it’s one of the things that now I’m adding two business ventures, which is make sure enjoy it also. Not just that it’s profitable. I enjoy this so much more when other people are in the space with me learning about it with me, so Ethan coming and hanging out at the space, that was so natural and so fun and a lot more of that will happen.

JL: I just want families in Cincinnati to have that experience. When you stand in that warehouse you should get to stand in that warehouse. It is bizarre. You know, this world is insane. It seems normal to me now, but it’s not. And I want other people to come. I want people to feel comfortable hosting a couple machines and I’ve done a friends and family discount for hosting where I’m barely breaking even on it. But it means they get to participate, which is better.

JL: I’ve got extra electricity sitting here, I’ve got empty plugs, why not share? And I think this industry could use a little bit more of that. I think if we were a little more open-handed with each other and I see that actually, there’s a lot of open sourcing going on and I really love that. And I think the more we do that, the better because it this is young, this is early. I want other people involved so that’ll be my approach. I do need to get my space cleaned up so it actually looks like a reasonable place. Maybe some more heat there, it’s a little cold right now in the office.

JL: I don’t have any heat running in the office space and my graphics cards that are sitting in there aren’t doing the job, so we’ll get it to a place where people can come visit. But that’s the plan. [crosstalk 00:22:10] The plan is to have, yeah, the plan is to have once a month open house events. So I think we’ll do that in the spring where people can just come and see it and maybe do like a one hour, what is crypto? What is Bitcoin? What is this bit corn thing you keep hearing about? And then I have ideas of running weekly classes where you get, maybe you pay 200 bucks to be in the class, you get a hardware wallet, you get $50 worth of Bitcoin loaded on it. We do a two hour class where you actually finally learn, what the heck is this thing? How do I use it? Where can I use it? That’s been, that’s my plan. And then of course as a teacher I can’t help but want to do that.

Scott: Right?

Ethan: Absolutely.

JL: That’s the heart behind it is how do we make this more accessible to everybody? I’ve got the space now. It doesn’t hurt me one bit to invite people in. I’m not scared of that, I’m not worried about people coming in and causing havoc.

Ethan: Definitely, we need to talk more about that.

JL: Oh totally.

Ethan: Definitely.

JL: Yeah, totally. I think you can wander over and we can do some great things.

Ethan: Yeah.

JL: I wish I lived as close to my warehouse as you do Ethan.

Scott: [inaudible 00:23:18] man.

Ethan: Just for everybody out there. I like literally live one mile away from where he is mining and it’s so easy and so convenient for me to go from my house to his farm.

JL: Yeah. And this is a, it’s a rare space that has a lot of available power but is near a city. So most of these locations are going to be in the middle of nowhere and I approval to go up to three and a half megawatts right now so that means I could have a much bigger warehouse full of equipment.

Scott: If you go up to three and a half megawatt, is your electricity price going to go down?

JL: I should be able to negotiate yet another drop. So I’m now, I’m renegotiating already right now, the deal I made even just a couple months ago. And that’ll get me into the fours, which, that’s reasonable. That’s reasonable. And I think at three megawatts we might be getting, right at about 4 cents. I can stay in this game for a long time at 4 cents.

JL: It’s not, like global, I’m not killing it globally, but it’s good enough that I get to keep running the business and that’s okay. I don’t need to be the most profitable miner. I just need to be profitable enough to keep doing it.

Scott: So how does that work with negotiating power? I know every county or every state is different.

JL: Yeah, very different. I mean California, there was nothing to negotiate. It was, here’s how, and in fact California is the, they don’t have, at least where I was stuck in my warehouse, they did not have excess power. So it was exactly the opposite. The more you use, the more expensive it got. And I get that, they had limited access to power. But in Ohio you have deregulation which allows for competition and that that can go outside of Ohio.

JL: So I got an energy broker to help me navigate this because this is not something I’m an expert at and that energy broker does this all day.

Ethan: Where does one find an energy broker?

JL: Well I’d be glad to tell you all about Blaise, which is the coolest name ever for an energy broker. I just send him lightning and fire emojis all the time. But there are a couple of people out there that are, they are all day. And of course, every commodity has a market where people are buying and selling. I just didn’t think about energy in that way, but got introduced to him from the guys over at Immersion Systems because he had helped them out with a couple things and yeah, he just said, “look, there’s an open market for energy. Let’s put your bid out there. Let’s say here’s how much you want to use right now. Here’s how much you want to use in the future. How much would they sell it for to you?” And they like miners because someone who has excess electricity, when they sell it to a miner, they know I will be using exactly the same amount every day, all day for the next two years. And it grows.

Scott: Consistence.

JL: Yeah, very consistent. They know exactly what they’re getting.

Ethan: Consistency and the Bitcoin mining industry doesn’t really seem, to fit to me, but yeah.

JL: Yeah, but they love us as energy buyers because we’re very consistent and we buy a lot at once. We buy a big block of energy. So, I got offers, I got competitive offers that you don’t see on their website and the broker’s taken a cut, and I’m actually thrilled. I like when incentives are aligned. I want that broker working super hard to get me a good deal because they know they get paid too if they get me a really good deal.

Scott: So just generally, generically, how much do you think a broker might make like on a per kilowatt hour basis?

JL: That’s a really good question. I think how it works is they’re adding, in the same way that mortgages used to work this way where the broker would get a rate from the bank and then give you a slightly different rate and they get the difference. Yeah, there’s a couple of points in here. So I would guess if you’re paying, let’s say 4 cents for electricity that if a broker worked with it, that there was 25 or 50 cents in there as a broker fee.

JL: But I don’t know. I don’t know how many points they’re adding. I do know that he was able to get me much lower offers than I can get, which is nice. And that comes with the benefit of, I’m not a big buyer on that market, buying a couple megawatts isn’t a big deal, but Blaise is working. I’m a part of Blaise’s portfolio and he’s selling hundreds of megawatts or maybe more like a gigawatt every year. So I’m getting to come along with that. When Blaise is selling more electricity, they have a 10 year relationship with Blaise of selling electricity. So I think I got better rates than how much I’m using with justify, which is great. That’s what you want, if you can get an advantage somewhere. Again, just one of the other places you can do slightly better if you just take a little time to figure it out.

Scott: Isn’t it crazy how many things there are to learn in this industry?

JL: Yeah.

Ethan: Oh yeah.

Scott: You take a crash course every single day, you know?

JL: Yeah, our last conversation was about, apparently there’s an opportunity for me to shut down my warehouse for small periods of time when there’s high demand and I get energy credits for doing that. And that will… I don’t mind shutting it down for a little while if on the back end that’s bringing it down another 25 or 50 cents overall for the month. That’s big savings for me. That might be five or $10,000 difference.

Scott: Oh, for sure.

JL: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah, so that’s interruptible power?

JL: Yeah. Yeah. And I might need a partner that can build some custom PDUs to help me with that, if you guys know anyone.

Ethan: I will advertise that in the next episode.

JL: Oh good, I’m really excited about that. That’s my next expansion. I’m really excited to talk with you guys more about. I’m stuck with whatever the person before me did and it’s-

Ethan: Oh yeah.

JL: It’s fine. Electric gets to the miner and they run. It’s not using the electricity very wisely and I’m excited to think about that from the ground up with you guys because I know you can customize a lot of things.

Ethan: Yeah.

JL: That’ll be fun.

Ethan: This is what happens when you mix residential and industrial electrical systems.

JL: What’s with all these plastic plates, this is so weird. Yeah, if you ever get a chance to walk through my space on one of those open house days, you’ll see what I mean. It looks like it, Ethan said it perfect. It looks like an industrial commercial contractor, a residential electrician had a baby and then did my space. Weird. Looks a little bit like your house and an industrial space at the same time.

Scott: Well we, we like to keep these episodes short so it’s easy for people to consume. But yeah, any last advice or tips for somebody maybe looking to get into this?

JL: Yeah, you know, there was one thing I meant to say earlier, which was, don’t overextend yourself but get involved somehow. I know it doesn’t feel like buying one miner right now is going to make any big difference in your life, but that’s where I started. I’m standing in a room full of 586 [Asics 00:30:16] but I got started with one graphics card and I would just say you want to be involved. If there’s any interest in all in tinkering with these machines and seeing how they work. Just think of it as, even if you lose all your money in buying a $500 miner or something. And I guess that’s the other thing is there’s a lot of used equipment, you do not have to buy the newest, most expensive machine that’s ever been made right now that just got released last week.

JL: Like there’s some great brokers out there that can help you find a used machine to get started. That would be my suggestion. If this is interesting at all to you, mining, just get started somehow.

Ethan: Yeah. Or even like your daughter, just get paid for your babysitting gigs in Bitcoin. Just take it on that way. Yeah.

JL: Totally. I mean, what does it hurt to throw a tiny bit of money and Coinbase is by far the easiest way for someone to get started. Just throw a little bit of money into Coinbase just so you can say you’re participating and then take it from there.

Scott: Yeah. And I know there’s a cash app, they have a way to do Bitcoin really easily and then, yeah. So where do you get most of your information or you said you participate in Telegram. Some people don’t know what that is.

JL: Yeah, right, right. And it is weird. It’s a little bit like GroupMe or WhatsApp, it’s this other world. But I, I started with just Google searches. Back in 2013 I just set up a Google search to send me any articles about Bitcoin and so once a week I got a digest, and that’s something you can just go on Google and set up in five seconds. Maybe that’s the easiest way to start. Just start, be careful what you read. A lot of this stuff out there is doom and gloom. If there’s any industry you’re a part of, you know a lot of the news just wants to sell the bad parts. But that’s where I started. I just started with some Google searches and some articles. I spend a lot of time in Reddit forums specific to coins, but I wouldn’t start there. Just get on. Bitcoin.com is fine, a great place to start. Just read some articles. Yeah.

Scott: Yeah, and so JL, if people want to reach out to you and learn more about your co-op there in Ohio, how should they do that?

JL: Yeah, a couple of different ways. You can email me [email protected], on Telegram you’ll find me JK Zeckler, on Twitter you’ll find me, same name, JL Zeckler, I’m glad to connect in any way that’s easy for you.

Scott: Awesome. Well we’re going to tweet this out and we’ll get your contact information out there and yeah. Well thanks for coming on our show.

Scott: This episode was sponsored by NovaBlock Mining Pool, and you can go to their website when you sign up. Use the invitation code OFFORD18