Juan Pinto is with Doctorminer, a professional bitcoin operation in Venezuela. Juan is a mechanical engineer and an energy specialist. On this episode, we will be discussing how two things. The first is how mining can help solve Venezuelan crisis and the second is how can companies in other countries deploy in Venezuela.
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Transcription
Scott Offord: Hey everybody, this is Scott Offord with the Crypto Mining Tools podcast, and we have our co-host Ethan Zurka with us.
Ethan Zurka: Hey everyone. Ethan here.
Scott Offord: And he’s going to introduce our guest today.
Ethan Zurka: Yes. Today we have Juan, I’m sorry if I can’t pronounce your last name correctly, I’m just going to go for it. It’s Pinto?
Juan Pinto: Yeah, it’s Pinto.
Ethan Zurka: Juan Pinto. And you are located where, Juan?
Juan Pinto: Caracas, Venezuela.
Ethan Zurka: Awesome.
Juan Pinto: Yeah, I mean one of the places that nobody wants to be, but it’s actually really, really nice to be, people don’t know that yet.
Ethan Zurka: Yeah. Help us understand a little bit about that. So we only can see what the media tells us about your country, you’re a living witness, you’re actually there on the ground. You can, you know, give us maybe a different perspective than just what the media does.
Ethan Zurka: The media likes to kind of shock people or say the worst of the worst of things to get people’s attention. And oftentimes we have to understand that a lot of people in America don’t understand that actually. And that’s kind of a big problem is they take the news as an absolute truth and don’t understand that it’s kind of been spin or there’s a twist to it to make it more extreme than it actually is. So yeah, tell us your perspective. Your side.
Juan Pinto: Yeah, it will take me like three hours to tell you this, but I will try to summarize as much as I can.
Ethan Zurka: Okay.
Juan Pinto: I don’t really know the purpose of why the media try to enhance things in such a way. I mean, what’s happening here, there really is a crisis that started already like four years ago. But the highest, the climax, the euphoria of the crisis, let’s say, happened two years ago. And after that we kind of reached the bottom and we’ve been staying like on the ground asleep, let’s say.
Juan Pinto: In a way, people have left the country, around 5 million people, which is a lot. Some people say it’s even six million. But I was outside too. I lived in Madrid in 2018 last year. I spent all last year outside Venezuela, and when I came back at the beginning of this year in February, I realized that many things changed and I saw the difference from how it was in 2017. And then I saw that the news kept saying the same thing when I started noticing that the security issues weren’t as high as before.
Juan Pinto: I was able to be on the street with more calm than before. But I don’t know what the reason is or why they say this. Even my family who’s living outside this, they speak to me all the time like if I’m going to die every day. Like, “How do you survive? How do you eat?”
Juan Pinto: And that’s not really what’s happening. I mean, after they release the currency, now there’s free circulation of the dollar in the country, before it was restricted. So that was the main reason why there was so much scarcity in the restaurants or in the marketplaces. It was very difficult to find things.
Juan Pinto: But now that the dollar was released, it was a natural behavior of the economy. I think it has nothing to do with politics. And I’m not involved with politics at all. I’m just talking from the economics perspective.
Juan Pinto: The country has improved in that sense. You can find stuff, even though now you have to pay the real price of things, because before you were able to buy things 10 times lower than the private international prices. Now prices are at international level, so most people cannot afford it.
Juan Pinto: But that’s part of the recovery of the economy. You cannot just wake up and be perfect immediately. It’s like a step by step process and people will have to suffer the changes to be able to reach a better future for the economy or a better future for their families and their lives.
Scott Offord: Yeah. So Juan, I have a question for you specifically regarding mining. We could talk a little bit about doctor mining later, but how do you see mining helping the Venezuelan people?
Juan Pinto: Well I’m trying not to be biased with my response but I mean I do think that mining is one of the main activities that can really help the Venezuelan economy to recover and the infrastructure of most of the main basic services like the transportation, electricity, there’s huge electricity problems here with [inaudible 00:04:42]. I suppose you have heard the news, we have had blackouts, national blackouts of more than a week, which is something unbelievable.
Juan Pinto: Water. There’s a lot of water issues. I mean, many houses in the country have no access to direct water services, hydro services. And I do think mining, it’s very important for us and for the economy because it creates a new way to transform our natural resources. The natural wealth that we have that is well known to be very big was one of the biggest in the world in oil, gas.
Juan Pinto: We have a huge electricity infrastructure of gas turbines to take advantage of that resources. But we have never been able to monetize it or to benefit from it because the only way to use it was just to export the oil in barrels to our countries.
Juan Pinto: And that is subject to sanctions, as it’s happening now. And right now we can not benefit from it, and the industry has really been destroyed in a way because if we cannot export it, and in Venezuela we actually give it for free. I don’t know if you heard, electricity here is free. Fuel, you can fuel the tank of your car and you can pay with a cigarette with it. And it’s allowed.
Juan Pinto: You can just fill your tank and just drive away and you can pay for it. Then it’s okay. I mean, you give tips to the guy who filled you.
Scott Offord: That’s wild, yeah.
Juan Pinto: Yes, that’s a big issue.
Scott Offord: One thing I’m wondering, so why are those blackouts happening?
Juan Pinto: The reason why the blackouts are happening is because electricity is free. So if people don’t pay for electricity, if there’s no value on the energy. Whether you care to maintain the generation resources, you have a turbine that you need to spend thousands of dollars every month and you get zero every month in return for the energy that that turbine produces. That’s the reason why. I mean there should be a way to monetize or to regain value for the energy that is produced because it’s huge hardware that is installed there. It needs to be maintained.
Juan Pinto: And that’s what mining gives. Mining is the first activity ever to provide value to energy. And I think this activity can really change the way Venezuela see its natural wealth and its economy. It’s like a new road or a new motor for the economy. This activity, it gives value to energy, and if you give value to energy, you give value to your natural resources like oil and gas again.
Juan Pinto: We’re not able to export gas for example. We don’t have the infrastructure to export gas. We have sources of gas everywhere being wasted every time. But with mining now you can go and take advantage from it and monetize it and use it to recover hospitals, education.
Juan Pinto: And that’s something that’s difficult to see because everywhere, even here in Venezuela and I know in the United States is the same, and everywhere in the world, people see mining as a waste in activity because it’s the easy way to do and is the first thing you see.
Juan Pinto: “Ah, yeah, it’s a machine that consumes energy, so it’s very wasteful, and you do this like you were a rat, robbing energy.” And when in fact it’s completely the opposite. You’re giving value to energy that is otherwise going to be wasted and that’s what we’re trying to do here. There’s many places where there are energy resources being wasted, not used that we can go there and monetize it and use that money to recover other sources of energy that are connected to people that can provide energy to hospitals, schools, houses.
Scott Offord: Are cryptocurrencies being used to make payments to purchase goods in your country or are people using that in a very real way?
Juan Pinto: Yes. You can even buy tops like [inaudible 00:08:27] with Bitcoin. In some shops, there are places, many places here where you can pay officially with cryptocurrency. There’s actually a national cryptocurrency called Petro, I don’t know if you heard about it.
Scott Offord: Yeah, we’ve heard.
Juan Pinto: It’s trying to be pushed by forcing companies to pay salaries of their employees in Petros and some shops are forced to give the option for the client to pay with Petros, but not only Petro there you can also pay with Bitcoin in places with Dash. Dash is the most popular one.
Scott Offord: Okay, Dash.
Juan Pinto: Jobs because they provide like the infrastructure with the devices and stuff. It’s more a friendly user for shop owner.
Scott Offord: User friendly.
Juan Pinto: Yep. And in terms of people, everybody here uses Bitcoin. I mean, local Bitcoins is like, I think Venezuela is one of the highest used in the country with local Bitcoins used the most per capita.
Juan Pinto: I mean every time I use it every day. Even my friends and everybody that I know that lives here are familiar with local Bitcoins because you can transform those into bolivars very quickly and you can protect from the devaluation of the bolivar, which as you know it has. In this year I arrived in Venezuela and it was like 15000 bolivars for $1 right now is almost 50000 so it’s like four times more expensive.
Juan Pinto: It has divided a lot. So you cannot just leave your money because it will have between 2020 the reward. So you use Bitcoin as a store of value, you use Bitcoin to protect the population of the bolivar. And you also have access to exchange it for whatever you want. So it’s very convenient
Ethan Zurka: On demand. Right? Can you walk us through the process? So I know one of the things that’s kind of been a challenge for adoption here in the United States is everybody has to have a phone in order to make payments so they can show their QR code and they can get it scanned.
Ethan Zurka: I know maybe in Venezuela it’s not possible for everyone to have a phone. Maybe it’s not even practical because there might not be a cell tower anywhere around. So how are payments being made without using a smart phone in Venezuela?
Juan Pinto: Oh, okay. In fact, you do need a phone.
Ethan Zurka: Okay.
Juan Pinto: Yeah. It’s still necessary. But it my surprise, you, but here in Venezuela, the people who lives here, whatever is happening, they always want to be on the top of technology. I mean, we’re a trendy country, whenever a new iPhone is released, everybody wants to have it.
Juan Pinto: I mean, not everybody have money to get it, but we are very trendy country. I don’t know how to say to explain, but I mean you can have no food in your fridge, but you have the latest smartphone.
Ethan Zurka: Okay.
Juan Pinto: That’s very common here, so not everybody has it. Of course I don’t want to say that everybody here has the money to get one, but the people who have the minimum to have one, they will buy and they will then find a solution for the food and for the transport.
Juan Pinto: But they will have…
Ethan Zurka: As long as they have that phone first, right?
Juan Pinto: That’s the way we works here. I mean, I don’t know if there are Venezuelans listening to me right now, but I know they will agree with me. It’s a very strange behavior that we have here, but the people who doesn’t have smartphones then they can ask friends to do it for them, to store the Bitcoins for them.
Juan Pinto: I do have some friends here who… It’s not that they don’t have smartphones, but they don’t know how to use it. So they just tell me, “Manage it for me.”
Juan Pinto: And whenever they want it I send it to them so they can change it or they can pay for it. But I mean it’s very different to United States because we have no option than to use it. We’re forced to use it. It’s the best solution, it’s the only way to survive.
Juan Pinto: And as I say this two years ago in a meeting that I have in another podcast of Katie Vogue in the Wire magazine, and I told her exactly the same. I mean, it’s not that we are the best crypto friendly countries use this. It’s a solution for us. It’s, it’s practical. It’s convenient for us to use it. So we find a way to use it.
Scott Offord: Yeah. All right. We got to take a little break here and we have to mention our sponsor NovaBlock, their a mining pool. Ethan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about them?
Ethan Zurka: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I definitely would like to say thank you to our sponsor NovaBlock. They launched here in August of 2019 and within four short months they became one of the top 15 public mining pools in the world.
Ethan Zurka: And their goal is to help decentralize the hash rate. They see, as miners and mining facilities are moving from China to other regions in the world, specifically North America, they believe that North America will be a leader in helping decentralize the mining landscape and help it move out from China. They have a deep philosophy of increased transparency and educating the customers. So they can make the pool choice that’s right for them. And I think it’s awesome.
Scott Offord: Yeah, and so a specific call to action today, if you go to NovaBlock.com, when you sign up in the top right hand corner of the website, enter the invitation code OFFORD18,
Scott Offord: And you can also talk with Vincent there at NovaBlock. His email is [email protected] and you can see if you can qualify for that permanent reduction. So if you have a lot of hash rate, you might be able to get it lower, but they’re offering a permanent reduction to 1.5 sorry, 1.8% pool fee for life. And so this phone offer is available until January 20th and if you sign up now, enter O-F-F-O-R-D-one-eight when you’re prompted.
Ethan Zurka: Yeah, I mean give it a shot guys. What do you have to lose, right?
Scott Offord: Yeah. So back to you, Juan. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Doctor Miner, where you guys came from, how you got started, and what you guys do now?
Juan Pinto: Well, we started out around four years ago. We just bought a mining rig. We actually sold our bikes, Theo and me. We are two founders and we sold our bikes, just to try to test the hardware and to see how it worked.
Juan Pinto: We pay for a guy, I mean he asks us for our bikes to teach us how to assemble the rig, connect to the climber, because we were using Ethereum, and that time actually started mining ZCash then. But it was just a hobby for us. And it was actually very dangerous because of the, I don’t know how to explain it, but before there was a misunderstanding with the activity and because it was not legal or illegal, the police was doing whatever they wanted with it. And they were taking people’s not only hardware, but also the money that they have mined.
Juan Pinto: They even have the wallets and they gave you their wallets for you to give them your money. So it was a very dangerous activity for us at the beginning. And we remain silent. We helped our friends. We started selling the rates to friends and family and then one of our friends had another friend who had a bigger order and then we started growing and growing until one day one of our clients got in trouble and we decided to stop the activity.
Juan Pinto: That was around 2017 and right before the bubble and we needed to stop and then we got like a little bit, we can say scared maybe, because of the prosecution that was happening with the miners here. We left. That’s why I left. I left at the beginning of 2018. That’s why I lived in Madrid by that year.
Juan Pinto: But then during that time I started reading on the news that everything changed. The opinion shifted. The government realized that cryptocurrency was in fact a solution for the country with the sanctions and stuff and they legalize mining, they open up to changes, they created Petro cryptocurrency and we kept working from outside. I kept working from Spain. My partner Theo was also in Spain. We were kind of advisers of the institution regulating cryptocurrency here in Venezuela.
Juan Pinto: We were kind of suggesting them stuff because we had some more experience. People knew a little bit about us there. I came back at the beginning of this year because we had projects to start deploying that vision that I’m having, which is converting some of our energy resources into money and invest it somewhere else to reconstruct most of the damage in electricity infrastructure here.
Juan Pinto: So we are, for example, building mining farms near turbines generation that are actually working. And we use that energy to transform it into money with mining and use that money to fix other turbines that are not working. So that’s kind of the vision that we have here. And that’s what we’ve been doing during these year in several places. And we are continue working on that. I do have hope on this activity as a motor for the recovery of our economy and the recovery of the country.
Scott Offord: Yeah. Are you guys mostly providing co-location hosting services or are you self mining?
Juan Pinto: Yep, so we started doing hosting at the beginning for a very important client. The first plan that we had, which really who believed in us from the beginning. I mean when I travel back to Venezuela, he told us that whatever we wanted, he was going to help us with our vision, which is, I don’t know if you heard about PandaMiner, it’s a Chinese company which worked with us since the beginning and they believed in Venezuela since the beginning and the owner of PandaMiner actually traveled here almost at the same time we came.
Juan Pinto: And he sent his machine and he helped us building my farm infrastructures, the places where we found it was strategic to build. And at the beginning we were just hosting machines for him. But as we were growing, we started buying our own hardware.
Juan Pinto: We started growing with clients, our clients started investing in us. And so right now what we’re doing is building farm for clients and operating farms for those clients, and building our own farms and running our own hardware.
Juan Pinto: And in the future we’re planning to do hosting for clients too. But we prefer not to do hosting services unless it’s our own mining farm. And so as we didn’t have our own farms yet built, we’re waiting for us to grow a little bit more to offer services, proper services to international clients.
Scott Offord: So right now you want to be able to offer something that you know that you’re in charge of the infrastructure, it’s not somebody else’s and you can manage the whole thing? Yeah.
Juan Pinto: Yeah, because I mean there are many places here where you can start a mining operation, but as I tell you the electricity infrastructure is not stable at all.
Juan Pinto: You are like kind of gambling that there’s going to be energy every day. So whenever I build a farm, I try to comply with the technical requirements of the energy service. I try to give back money to the energy company because here you can make use to keep in mind here and pay zero because electricity is free.
Juan Pinto: So for me that’s not sustainable and that’s not a longterm approach because it can happen for one month, two month and in three months maybe you got to disconnected from the grid permanently. So I prefer to be in a place where I can guarantee a stable energy service for longterm contracts one year, two years, three years.
Juan Pinto: So that’s why I decided to build my own infrastructure. And strategically in order to offer services to international clients. Yes.
Ethan Zurka: Yeah. Can you tell us more about the infrastructure you’ve helped to maintain and rebuild? How many turbines today have you successfully been able to bring back online or keep maintained on a regular basis? And give us an idea of how that benefits just beyond the crypto mining space and keeping your miners running, how that’s helping other people in your country keep the lights on and keep industry going and things like that.
Juan Pinto: Yeah. I’m going to give you an example. For example, one of the mining firms that we built in cooperation with local institutions there in Lara Estate, you can Google it up later, and that farm is connected to a gas turbine facility.
Juan Pinto: There’s four gas turbines there, 20 megawatt each. When they arrive there, before we connected the farm to the turbine to the facility, out of the four turbines, there was only one running. So the other three were stopped due to maintenance or some breakdowns or something. And the one that was running was only running at 50% of its capacity or even less. Instead of 20 megawatts it was at like eight megawatts potential.
Juan Pinto: So what we did is we started finding out what was happening. We did like a kind of a research and we saw that the reason why it was running at so low capacity is because you are supposed to receive maintenance every twenty thousand hours. And because it was the only turbine running, they weren’t able to stop it to do maintenance to it.
Juan Pinto: So had to stay 60000 hours running.
Scott Offord: Goodness gracious.
Juan Pinto: That’s why we fixed. So what we did is we proposed the idea to connect our mining farm to that turbine, not to the full capacity. The email was we only needed two megawatts on the turbine for two, three months and we were going to pay for that energy, and the money that we would receive for that energy was going to be enough to fix the turbine beside the other 20 megawatt turbine.
Juan Pinto: And once they fix it they can turn it on and turn off the one that was on right now, do maintenance to it. And so that they will have two turbines at 20 megawatt capacity and go from 8 megawatt to 40 megawatts, which is a lot for a state that only consumes are our 300 but it’s only about more than more than 10% increasing capacity.
Juan Pinto: So that’s kind of a small example of what we want to do and nationally, in every state like to recover all that infrastructure that each state has in order to make the money a bit more independent from the main source, this hydroelectric source called Guri is the third largest in the world.
Juan Pinto: But since 2010, Guri hasn’t been enough for the consumption of the country. So since that day we needed to start building gas turbines on each state so that each state has like a backup source to reduce load on the main source. So that’s where we’re trying to do. We’re trying to recover the those backup sources on each stage so that we can do maintenance to the main source. And this is the idea for us to recover the electric system and make it as robust as it was intended to be, one of the most robust electric system in the continent.
Juan Pinto: We have oil and gas generation capacity installed in Venezuela is larger than whole South America combined. You combine all gas turbine generations in all South American countries and Venezuela has larger than all of them combined, which is really high. And we also have the Guri, which is the third hydro power dam in the world.
Juan Pinto: The only problem is that they do need maintenance. How do you do maintenance to them if they don’t…
Scott Offord: They’re making their money, yeah.
Juan Pinto: With mining, they do make money, and most of the solutions, and that’s something that I say every time. I mean if you Google it up there is ONG organizations. I don’t know if you heard about the CAF, C-A-F, which is a very large organization that helps undeveloped countries to recover and stuff.
Juan Pinto: They are assigning money to Venezuela and other countries, especially Venezuela, to recover the electricity system to help people, to help hospitals that are run out of energy. So there’s patients that are suffering there because of that and the solutions that they propose, everybody’s proposing the same.
Juan Pinto: They go to the wrong sources of area. “Where are the problems? Where are the turbines that are not working? Okay, so we’re going to invest all those millions of dollars to fix this.”
Juan Pinto: And my approach is completely different. I go to the sources that are still working.
Scott Offord: You find something that you can start with.
Juan Pinto: Yeah, with this source, I can make money to fix the other sources.
Scott Offord: And add, yeah.
Juan Pinto: I don’t need to raise money to fix this. I prefer to use that money to build more hospitals, to build more places to produce food, to reveal the agriculture infrastructure instead. If you already have infrastructure, you go to the sources that are working, you monetize it using proof of work, using Bitcoin mining, and you use that money to fix the other sources.
Juan Pinto: It’s a sustainable solution, but it’s difficult to make them understand, we’re two currents going in different directions. The same goal with different approaches. But at the end we will see which one, brings more value to the country.
Ethan Zurka: Yeah. I have a question for you. What is something that you need right now? Obviously it’s difficult for people in the United States to work with Venezuela today… sanctions.
Ethan Zurka: But let’s say somebody in Canada or somebody in some other part of the world, what could they do to help you guys right now?
Juan Pinto: Well, the main thing will be to help us build infrastructure near the sources. We have already do the work. We have spent a whole year traveling around the whole country, every place where we think there is energy potential, where we can take advantage of it and use it to help the country, to really help the country. So we find those places and it’s not just like, “Okay, I found a place, let’s transform that into money.”
Juan Pinto: Now you need to build the mining infrastructure, which will be mining containers for some places, depending how remote they are. Or it can be just mining farms on that places, depending on the climate. For example, there’s a place in the North of Venezuela, very strategically, very, very strategic. We plan to use it in next year at the beginning of next year. And there are huge energy resources there that are connected to one of the largest oil refineries in the world, which is like their tree.
Juan Pinto: All the refineries connected that produces the fuel that can be used by the turbines to produce the energy that we will be transforming to money with the miners. So for me it’s like a no brainer. It’s a huge solution. And it’s also like a purity to explain because you, you have like a solution from the top that you are feeding the country all the way down and helping all the people living below because there’s not many people living there.
Juan Pinto: It’s just a industrial infrastructure there that we can, with mining, reveal and make it a money converter or a money maker to help people down there suffering from electricity problems, water problems, food problems, housing problems, health problems, all those problems that are true that you were asking me from the beginning, the media enhanced, that are really happening.
Juan Pinto: But that can be helped with this activity. I mean we can really improve from within. We don’t need help from anybody else because that’s what proof of work promotes. Like on each place you can transform the natural wealth into money. You can kind of print money in the Bitcoin way and use it down there. So to help them what we’ll need from international investors is to help us build that infrastructure in those strategic places where the one, I’m telling you in the North it’s called Falcon State, you can Google it up too. It’s to help us build infrastructure.
Juan Pinto: They’ll make that vision possible. We will still do it even if we don’t receive help or leverage from international investors because they’re all scared to invest here. And I understand it and there’s no way for me to change their mind. I’m betting on this and I believe this is possible. I’m running this idea, I’m running this project. Even if I don’t have the leverage from them and still do it, even if it’s with my own money, even if I have to go stone by stone, even if it takes me years because I know it’s possible.
Juan Pinto: I know in the future if I create the first solution and I prove that it works, even though I already build one in a lot of state, but if I do it also in Falcon State, people would start noticing, people will see I build things and they start believing in it and then it can grow faster than it is now.
Juan Pinto: But I still do it. It will still do it.
Scott Offord: So Juan, other than money what’s something very practical and physical that you could use? For example, a transformer, a generator, a turbine.
Juan Pinto: Yeah, it’s actually not money. I mean, if you send me money, I will use the money just to buy the mining infrastructure, which will be transformed by electric cable suit with boards. The rocks for the minors can be the fans in case they use air cooling, which is something that is not suitable in every place here.
Juan Pinto: For example, in Falcon State we have the problem of salinity. I think you say in English, in the air. There’s too much salt in the air. There’s a lot of corrosion with the machines. I mean we have already tried to mine near the beach and it’s really difficult here near the Caribbean sea and that place needs and it’s mandatory to use immersion system. And we have already been in contact with immersion system team that we met in Las Vegas.
Juan Pinto: Thanks to Scott by the way. And that’s one of these things I will need, I mean if somebody says to me, “Okay, we’ll buy the immersion system for you.”
Juan Pinto: I will send a thanks to you, more than welcome. I don’t need the money. Just send me the immersion dancers, send me the pumps, or send me a transformer, so that I’m able to make this idea reality and make this dream a reality.
Juan Pinto: I know it’s going to happen, but rather than money it can be electric staff, it can be ventilation staff, or cooling stuff like immersion system.
Scott Offord: Okay.
Ethan Zurka: Juan, you said things have really changed significantly since you left and since you’ve now returned, can you maybe paint a picture and I know predicting the future is difficult, but from where you stand, your perspective, what do you see happening in the next 12 to 24 months? The next one to two years?
Juan Pinto: In Venezuela or with mining in general.
Ethan Zurka: In Venezuela. Yeah. Just in the whole picture how mining is changing things and…
Juan Pinto: I’m confident that 2020 will be the year of mining in Venezuela. I do think that it’s going to become top three, not to say top one industry in the country. I mean the whole economy is going to be based upon cryptocurrency mining because our economy’s currently based only on oil production, and we didn’t have any way to export oil anymore because of the sanctions and all the blockages that we have right now, and we are proposing a solution to do the same, but internally without the need to export it.
Juan Pinto: And we have spent the whole year trying to explain this solution to them and I do believe that they have realized that it’s true. We have proved to them that it’s possible and if it continues to be this way next year I think it’s going to become the top one industry in the country.
Scott Offord: Yeah. Well Juan, we’re coming to the end here, but how can people contact you?
Juan Pinto: Well, you can contact me via email. My email is, it’s going to be difficult to understand because in the Spanish name, Juan Jose, [email protected] and you can also find me on my Twitter handle even though it’s more of our chief posting account, but I do share good content there. At @bchainbtc that will be my Twitter handle.
Scott Offord: Okay.
Ethan Zurka: Right. Yeah. Thank you very much, Juan. Very informative.
Juan Pinto: I really appreciate your time.
Scott Offord: Yeah, thanks for being our guest today and we’ll see you around.
Juan Pinto: All right, thank you. Bye.
Scott Offord: We’d like to thank our sponsor again, NovaBlock. They are at novablock.com, they’re a mining pool in North America and they just launched recently, but they are offering a 1.8% permanent reduction in the mining fees.
Scott Offord: So go to their website at novablock.com and enter the code after you sign up on the link on the top right hand side of the corner of the website, enter the invitation code OFFORD18