#006 Richard Camara - Crypto Mining Tools Podcast

Richard is a doctor specializing in Radiology for his day job, but he is also a cryptocurrency miner who started a small GPU farm in January 2018. He and his brother started the business together and have continued to fight through this long unprofitable season of GPU mining at residential power. They have recently secured collaboration with a hydroelectric dam and will be expanding to this new location with favorable electrical rates. We discuss what miners with unfavorable electric rates can do to remain profitable in the current market.

Transcription

Scott Offord: All right. Welcome, everybody. We’re live. This is the Crypto Mining Tools Podcast. I’m Scott Offord, the host, and we have Ethan Zurka, the co-host.

Ethan Zurka: Hi. Ethan here.

Scott Offord: Today we have Richard Camara. Richard is long time into GPU, and he’s actually really close to me here in Wisconsin area. So Richard, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re up to?

Richard Camara: Cool. Yeah, I’ll give a quick summary. I ended up selling crypto to pretty much everyone I run into at work, so I almost got … Just on a side note, I had them tell me to stop talking about cryptocurrency at work.

Scott Offord: A real crypto evangelist, huh?

Ethan Zurka: Right?

Richard Camara: This is true story. I work as a radiology resident. I sent an email to 120 of the guys I work with and told them that they should all invest with me. That’s still to be determined if they missed out. We’re not sure yet. Yeah.

Scott Offord: Was that when a Bitcoin was at 17,000 or?

Richard Camara: I’m an evangelist even as it crashes. Because you asked, I’ll get to the quick summary. My brother, it was in early, not super early but early 2017, he was just fixed cost investing into cryptocurrency, maybe distributed among the top 10 coins. I don’t know, he might’ve been putting, I have a twin brother, maybe $100 a month then or something. We got it up to about $3,000 and decided to sell his cryptocurrency for cash, and then convert that to a computer. So, he went out and bought I think a six-card 1070. Yeah. This card 1070 rig from Emerald computers is a guy out … Actually, I don’t know where … He’s in Arizona or something in Nevada.

Richard Camara: The guy was just building mining computers, extremely stable mining GPU computers. And then this was December 2017, and he called me and said, “Hey, I’m printing 20 US dollars a day or something,” something ridiculous. I mean, every 1070 he was making $4 or $5 a day. I was like, “Wow.” So very foolishly I guess, well, hindsight’s 2020, but I took my own savings account, and this is just very foolish, but I guess I just gamble on the fact that I have stable future income. So I was like, “I’m going to go all in on this.” I’m very honest guy, so I’ll just share exactly the financials. It just makes sense to people.

Scott Offord: Sure.

Richard Camara: I took $35,000 of my own cash and then I borrowed another 30,000 approximately. So, basically, it ended up totaling to about, after interest … Because I’m a doctor, so I have medical school loans, I couldn’t find anyone like Wells Fargo to let me borrow money. They said, “No, your debt-to-income ratio is too high.” I was so ambitious that I found a private lending service and went out, and the interest rate was very bad, I guess, what people tell me. I was excited because they let me borrow the money. I think that half of it was at 12% or 13% interest. I think this is good first off for the podcast because it gives a very honest perspective to what some people have been doing the last two years in crypto.

Scott Offord: Absolutely.

Richard Camara: I took 70,000 total and bought as many 10 ATIs as I could.

Scott Offord: Oh, wow.

Richard Camara: Yeah. This was at the hayday of 10 ATI prices. Some of the EBJ ones were selling for 1,500.

Scott Offord: Oh, yeah. I see.

Richard Camara: Yeah. What I did is I set up push notifications so that anytime the inventory on [inaudible 00:03:48] would refresh with any GPU under say $900 for 10 ATI I would buy it. So I was that guy that was preventing all the gamers, unfortunately from buying 10 ATIs. I mean, there’s no one that was faster than me. I had Apple pay set up, I would be at work and I would get a notification, and I would just smile at my phone and purchase it. And so 60 total 10 ATI is what I ended up being able to purchase plus all the power supplies and such. And you just got to shop around and try to find prices. But then my brother and I realized that the market, as foolish as it was, after about a month or two realized the market was not continuing to go up. In the previous three months prior to realizing this, we had also evangelized this to a bunch of family and friends to the point where we had around 250 10 ATIs that we were managing.

Scott Offord: Oh wow.

Richard Camara: My brother was taking a cut from the management, but the rest of the profit was going to the owners of those graphics cards, and we hosted them. I live in Wisconsin, so I hosted a good fraction of mine here in Wisconsin, and then the other 20%, 30% in Alabama where my parents live. And my brother did the same thing with a friend of ours. And so in total we were managing, I think total capital investment was around, it wasn’t quite 250 10 ATIs, but it was around $250,000 worth of GPU and only really GPS. We could get into the details of why we chose 10 ATIs. Simple summary is we wanted to have the most powerful card that could mine the most greatest diversity of cryptocurrencies.

Richard Camara: Unfortunately, all the Z cash and Z cash clones were one of the primary profit drivers at the time, and I’m not going to get into all the … I’m sure there’s a bunch of animosity toward people [inaudible 00:05:39] that have said they were going to remain ASIC resistance, but it’s just not true. So 10 ATIs was still a pretty good choice, but so over the last two years, I’ll just zoom forward, our business strategy, because for us cryptocurrency was not healthy at the beginning of 2017 where it peaked and started going down, was to only turn the GPUs on even though we have residential power rates when they’re profitable, and sell almost daily if not daily, if not every other day in order to prevent our cryptocurrency holdings from losing value in mitigating the profit that we made originally.

Richard Camara: I mean, it makes sense. You want to lock in your profit if the cryptocurrency is crashing. We are not hoddlers or whatever you want to call it in principle. I have my own opinions on holding cryptocurrency, but over the last two years … I’ll just use my example because I keep pretty firm track of my finances. So of the original investment of 70,000, this is not including the interest I’ve paid because we can talk about how I’ve paid off that loan. But if I had had 70,000 interest free and I’d put it into GPUs, and then my electrical bill would be somewhere around … It’s a little hard to calculate because I don’t pay the electric bill in Alabama, so I’m just kind of rough estimating. But basically I would have put about $80,000 if you’re just counting the electric here in Wisconsin. Probably a little more, maybe like 82,000 if I look at my spreadsheet, and I’ve made back about 41,000 in revenue.

Ethan Zurka: How long has it been?

Richard Camara: I had everything up and running because I was in India during January. By February one 2018. So until now. We’re at 22 months. I have a lot to share but that’s kind of the summary of where I’m at. I’ve been 22 months into GPU mining with 10 ATIs. About half of the investment is paid back, which I look at both pessimistically and optimistically because obviously my GPUs are aging, they’re getting used. I’ve had to send back a few for warranty and get them replaced. I have to be tech savvy and sometimes replace the fans if I don’t want to send them back. And also with new pass rate increases or even continuity of harsh rate price changes, the whole market can do …

Richard Camara: There’s so many variables, but I’m halfway paid off, which is both, I guess better than what you would say. If you were two years into the stock market investment you would … We can talk about, you got to beat the stock market or whatever you want to say is your global market investment, which is like 8% a year if you want to say you’re running a smart business. If you’re not doing that, then you shouldn’t have. You kind of wasted your time. Yeah. I’ll let you guys drive the podcast. But that’s my thing. Two years in, halfway paid off.

Scott Offord: I mean, I find that really amazing that you went into GPU mining right at the beginning of what we call the crypto winter.

Richard Camara: It’s the worst time.

Scott Offord: But I guess this is what makes the survivors from the victims. I mean, a lot of people could’ve just thrown in the towel, and given up, and liquidated, and we hear this time and time again. This is what really drives people to innovate and find really unique solutions to stay profitable and to keep it going. And I just admire your resilience.

Richard Camara: Yeah, I have a couple, one of my friends who is part of our group of 10 ATIs that we work with, his name’s Nate. And we make jokes all the time about how we’re going to make crypto babies because we’re not pulling out.

Scott Offord: I like that.

Richard Camara: But we want to make sure [inaudible 00:09:37] it’s inappropriate from a professional standpoint, but we call each other every day and we’re just like, “Hey man, the market is terrible. I mean, it’s not good.” I believe in cryptocurrency, I believe in a secure financial system, but as far as running a business mining cryptocurrency, which I’m not all pessimistic, I’ll share some positive stuff, but it’s hard to mine at residential. You cannot build an argument for residential GPU mining with the residential rates. Honestly, I’ll put my contact information and talk to anyone who wants to talk to me about it for as long as they want to talk about it, to try to justify it. You can’t. Not at residential power rates right now. It doesn’t matter what GPU buy, it doesn’t matter what costs you get that hardware for, you can’t right now.

Richard Camara: And even if you’re like, oh, I’m going to mine and hold the cryptocurrency, what you’re really doing is buying a fixed amount of cryptocurrency on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, which is no different than fixed cost investing at a discount. If you’re actually mining at less than what your electrical cost is, I can see mine for 24 hours, you make X amount of crypto, if that doesn’t pay your electric rate for those 24 hours, you’re actually just fixed costs investing with 110% or 120% of that. You’re actually increasing your cost to buy that cryptocurrency. So yeah, anybody listening, feel free to chat with me. But I’m here to dispel that conspiracy that you shouldn’t mine either. It’s not a huge concern. Lots of people become smart to this, but you should never mine when you’re making less than your electric. It just doesn’t make sense.

Ethan Zurka: So, Richard, I have a GPU question for you.

Richard Camara: Sure.

Ethan Zurka: I recently retired a computer that I built I think almost six years ago, and it had like a 780 or something, something ridiculous like nothing today. And my newest computer [crosstalk 00:11:49].

Richard Camara: Oh, that’s what I’m streaming on right now.

Ethan Zurka: Oh, okay.

Richard Camara: Yeah, yeah.

Ethan Zurka: My computer that I just bought has a 2080 super in it, and I was wondering, what are your thoughts of the 2080 versus the 1080 in mining? Is there a big advantage or is it just a marginal?

Richard Camara: I guess from what I can … because I don’t have a 2080 to compare it to, but I do have, we’ll, we won’t get into details how I got it, but I got an RTX Titan.

Ethan Zurka: Okay.

Richard Camara: Which I have fun with just playing around. And the problem is, is that yes, the current generation of super cards are more efficient, but we’d have to plug it in right now, I’m not convinced that that efficiency creates a respectable payoff time or residential rates.

Ethan Zurka: Okay.

Richard Camara: Right. I mean, here’s the thing. If your investment strategy is you said, I want a fixed cost invest in cryptocurrency, you just say I just want to put $100 a month into cryptocurrency or $5 a week, I don’t know what it is. Maybe you want to put $10,000 a month into cryptocurrency and make it your retirement. If you were going to do that, you could possibly consider, even at residential rates, buying efficient enough cards that they’re still profitable, as in they make more than their electric rate. This doesn’t mean they pay themselves off immediately,

Ethan Zurka: Sure.

Richard Camara: But you could use that as a strategy for purchasing crypto at a discounted rate. You still have to be careful because when it comes to mining, you got to look at your 20 ATI, and you got to say … You said 2080 super, right?

Ethan Zurka: Yeah, 2080.

Richard Camara: You got to look at your 2080 super and really honestly from a mining perspective, we’re not talking about investing, we’re just saying, can I buy a computer and is it a profitable investment? It has to pay itself off. The cryptocurrency you earn has to pay off that graphics card.

Ethan Zurka: Okay.

Richard Camara: And in my opinion, it has to pay off that graphics card if you sold daily. Not if you held the cryptocurrency because those are two different things. One is mining and then the other one is an investment decision. And they’re actually just, when you do both, when you mine and hold the cryptocurrency, you’re basically just rolling. You’re gambling, well not gambling, but you’re taking risk twice. And it’s just to me, you need to take your hardware and calculate what it makes daily and say, will that pay off my hardware in a respectable amount of time?

Scott Offord: [crosstalk 00:14:22] what is a respectable amount of time?

Richard Camara: That doesn’t specifically answer your question. Oh, well to me, I’m all about just running a valid business profit. I want to be an investment, and I also have to keep track of my time, right? So if I could put my money in the stock market and I would say, let’s say I had $100,000 and I put it in the stock market right now, in 10 years, it’s pretty standard as long as there’s no huge market correction, you might have to extend your investment horizon, but for 100,000 now you should have 200,000 in 10 years.

Scott Offord: Yeah.

Richard Camara: This is just right. So you’re computing hardware. If you bought $100,000 of computers they better have made above their electric rate, more than $200,000.

Scott Offord: So a hundred percent return within 10 years?

Richard Camara: Right. Now one caveat being maybe your computers at the end of 10 years are worth. If you bought $100,000 now of computers, you might say, hypothetically have $20,000 that you could sell them for. They’re old but somebody might buy them …

Scott Offord: True.

Richard Camara: … maybe even 10,000 right? You’ve got to make more actually in just profit above your electric rate than 190,000.

Scott Offord: Okay.

Richard Camara: Because then you’d add the 10,000 of depreciated assets …

Scott Offord: Residual value.

Richard Camara: Right.

Scott Offord: Yeah.

Richard Camara: Exactly. But again, you have to keep in track that you’re going to be out there repairing the fans, checking hive OS, simple, minor everyday checking what to mine, especially with GPU miners because A6, you can just put them on autopilot. But with GPU mining, you got to check it. I would say, you can even do switch mining, but even then you still … I can’t tell you the number of times I use simple miner and I log in and I see the one of my rigs is offline and I’m like …

Scott Offord: Wow. So even with the GPU, I always thought that GPU mining was more stable than a ASIC mining. But what you’re telling me is it’s not, it’s very high maintenance.

Richard Camara: I like to share a good experience. It’s hit or miss. My brother’s computer that he bought from the guy in Arizona, I think it’s gone down once in two years. But if you buy a bunch of aftermarkets, if you do, for instance, most of my rigs use the VETA frames, I think that’s how people say it, the open air frames, and they either have six or eight cards, and one learning thing is we put two power supplies on most of those eight card rigs. And something I’d love to have an engineer clarify to me, but static builds up on those things. If you restart them once, four of the cards drop. They’re on the second power supply that’s bridged. There’s something weird that happens, that’s one thing. Another thing is risers are notoriously … There’s numerous content creators that can vouch for this.

Richard Camara: You can get a bad batch of risers that will cause you nightmares for months, weeks, years. You’ll still be working out the bugs. One thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t know, I haven’t fully validated this, but I found some risers that have an increased number of capacitors, that has seemed to actually … I know it’s dumb, but if you look at it and you can see the little metal cylinders, those are the capacitors. If you actually have increased number of compared to those cheap ones, and those ones are just even like a dollar or two more and they have more capacitors, they have tended to be more stable.

Scott Offord: Okay.

Richard Camara: I’ve had even things I’ve noticed, if you move out the GPU and a riser, and it’s just not even positioned correctly, you’ll lose signal throughout that GPU.

Scott Offord: Wow.

Richard Camara: Most of my rigs that I’ve been running for two years now, I have them pretty stable. I would say I can check on them every couple of days, and I’m pretty confident that none of them have gone offline. But it’s not easy always.

Scott Offord: Yeah. Okay. Well I want to talk to you a little bit about ASICs, and what your plan for the future is, but first, Ethan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about our sponsor?

Ethan Zurka: Yeah, I’d like to just take this moment right now to give a big thanks and a shout out to NovaBlock mining pool. They are located here in North America, and they launched in August of 2019. And within four short months they’ve managed to make it to one of the top 15 public mining pools in the world. Their goal is to help decentralize the hash rate, and they believe that as the hash rate is shifting away from China because of its political issues and moving towards North America, that they can give consumers in the industry increased transparency and educate their customers on what the best type of [inaudible 00:18:53] for their needs are.

Scott Offord: Yeah, and so for our listeners right now, you can go to novablock.com, and if you sign up on the top right hand corner of the website, you can use the invitation code offord18, that’s O-F-F-O-R-D-1-8, and you can get a permanent reduction in your mining fees down to 1.8%. So thanks for our supporters and for our sponsor.

Ethan Zurka: Yeah, thank you NovaBlock.

Scott Offord: So Richard, won’t you tell us a little bit about what you’re going to do in the future, and are you going to keep on mining? Are you going to try out mining at something that’s not residential? What do you have in the works?

Richard Camara: Sure. This is probably why I’ve become considered at my work lik a crypto evangelists, and this is the reason why I emailed about 120 of the doctors that are actually, they’re all my boss. I work for all of them. I mean, imagine you’re a new guy at your job and you email 100 of the people that are your boss and say, “Hey come invest in this high risk investment,” that you don’t even know what … Half of them don’t even know what the word Bitcoin means, so I’m like this cool blockchain investment. And I sent them all the 75 … I thought it was the most brilliant PowerPoint I’ve ever created. It was a 75 page PowerPoint that from start to finish explained everything about cryptocurrency. I mean, it is what it is, but basically it’s the only product that …

Scott Offord: Probably 70 pages is too long for them, right?

Richard Camara: Yeah.

Scott Offord: Right.

Richard Camara: Here is what was in that PowerPoint, and I’ve gotten much better at summarizing it. And I will say this, and this is not to be cryptic, anyone can reach out to me and talk to me about this. But there is something to be said in the cryptocurrency industry that the low power rates, I mean, I’m just sharing my opinion, is the secret sauce to all cryptocurrency mining.

Scott Offord: Oh yeah.

Richard Camara: In the sense that honestly there are people sitting on very low power rates that are not interested in reaching out, and networking with other people, and working with other people because they have basically this golden egg and that golden egg is their security toward basically financial freedom, even retirement, to just cruise into the next 10 years without ever worrying about finances. That’s my one caveat. So when I talk here, I’m not going to share where I have networked for low power rates, which I have. And that’s not to be, I just don’t want to publicize it out on the world. A, I haven’t asked for permission from the people that I’m networking with. But, what I’ve done, these are tools for anybody who wants to continue mining into the future. I think this is the key to cryptocurrency mining.

Richard Camara: If you want to be a miner, I’m basically obsessed with being a miner more than an investor. If I have to mine my cryptocurrency and sell it for the rest of my life, I would rather do that because I’m a miner. I like running hardware. I like computers. I went into my job because as weird as it is, I just like clicking buttons. I like the sound of mechanical switches, so I just enjoy tactile. I like mechanics. I like computer chips, silicon, that’s my thing. So what I’ve done is I’ve started on a quest to find low power. And maybe other people have done the same thing. My first thought process was I’m going to build up my own hydroelectric dam.

Scott Offord: Okay.

Richard Camara: And when I looked into some small modular hydroelectric systems that you can just install in a river, one of them is called turbulent. And they’re made by, it’s a European I think university might be the originators of this. The thought process is they can go to high altitude mountains and for example, Peru where there’s a river, and install this for a town or a small a community that has limited access to consistent electrical supply. And it can make quite a bit of power. You can Google it. It’s turbulent but there’s other ones.

Scott Offord: Now, is that the one, Richard, that goes off to the side of the stream and swirls around so it doesn’t kill the fish?

Richard Camara: Exactly. It’s like it kind of looks like you took the impeller from we’ve all seen the history channel like battleships, and you took it and went horizontal with it, and then brought water into it [crosstalk 00:23:09]. I mean the other thing it reminds me of is we’ve all been at like, what is it at Pizza Hut, you used to be able to put a coin in and would [crosstalk 00:23:15].

Scott Offord: Oh, yeah.

Richard Camara: … and it would spin. It kind of looks like that. It’s like a giant funnel, and the water goes down through it turning a turbine, and then comes out the other side. And two things you need for electricity is flow, but then also, the other engineering term, and I’m not a physicist but is drop. You need to have height of the water. So you can have a very small stream with a very high drop, and that’ll make up for the fact that you could have a really big stream with low altitude change and it has large flow that could also make good electricity. But the secret sauce is high flow, high altitude. That’s the reason why places like the Columbia river basin or the Yangtze river in China, they have such enormous potential because of A, height, the drop that they have, but also the flow.

Richard Camara: But what I realized is in order, in the United States, because I want to do business in the US, to build out a small hydroelectric system because I’ll just get to the chase on this, it’s very difficult. If you just want to build an unregulated hydroelectric generator on a river, the river has to have never been used. I’m sure there are people that have way more expertise than I have, but what I came to the conclusion of is not that it’s impossible, but the easiest way to do this is on a river that’s never had any commercial activity, and on private property. No commercial because if it’s ever had like for instance, logging on the river even a hundred years ago, then the federal government has their fingers in it as far as approved.

Scott Offord: Okay.

Richard Camara: But if you could buy like a hundred acre plot of land that had a water spring coming out of it, and it went out of the ground on your property, and then into the ground on your property and dropped out 5,000 feet and nobody had ever used it for logging, you could do whatever you want, especially if you don’t set it out to the grid. If you have the magic sauce and you can find that, and you live in Northern Montana, big sky, you’re on the backside of big sky or whatever and you can find a river, and it’s never been touched by humanity, and you own the property, you can build as many hydroelectric generators on this thing as you want. But I couldn’t find a good … I mean, I think I called 200 people just saying like, “Tell me if you know someone who has land with a river.” I even asked all the guys that I work with at my hospital, “Does anybody have a river that is untapped in remote locations?” I even have family on a dairy farm.

Scott Offord: Were you asking patients? Were you like, “Hi, I’m going to be taking care of you. You wouldn’t happen to have a land with river on it by any chance.”

Richard Camara: In all honesty, that close proximity to violating professionality in my job, we have these patients that are called global executives, which are middle Eastern billionaires that fly into our hospital specifically for treatment from United States doctors, and it has strongly crossed my mind to violate [inaudible 00:26:01] and just approach them and say, “I know you’re really wealthy even though I never took care of you, I know you came to our hospital, do you want to invest in my business?” But I did not, but you are not farfetched. Okay. That got erased. Basically, to make hydroelectric, I looked at, wind power is also a possibility. A, it’s continuous day and night, which you need for cryptocurrency.

Richard Camara: But it didn’t justify like if you say here’s my capital investment in production of electricity and here’s my capital investment in computers, you basically cut your earning potential and doubled your payoff time the second you combined it with wind. And then solar was even worse because you had to either be in a geographic region where it’s called net metering, where if I send X amount of electricity to the power company grid during the day, then certain regions, and Delaware is one of them, there’s a couple other, I think Nevada is pretty good about this, you can pull from the grid an equal amount of electricity without paying any extra. Other places are horrible where actually you might send it to them and they’ll reimburse three cents worth of electricity per kilowatt hour or something, but then when you use it you have to pay more.

Scott Offord: Like [inaudible 00:27:24]. Yeah.

Richard Camara: Right. I mean, some even hydroelectric dams are like this where the lights in their building cost 13 cents per kilowatt hour to run because all their electricity goes to the grid. And when they pulled back from the grid, they might get reimbursed at three when they send it out. But when they use it, it’s 13. Geographically, if you’re going to use solar, you have to be in a state that is friendly for letting you. Otherwise, you need batteries. And trust me, when you buy solar panels batteries and then have no money left to buy cryptocurrency computers, you’ll have an infinite payoff time. I mean, it far exceeds that 10 year rule where you double your money in 10 years.

Richard Camara: Here’s the conclusion to all of this, and feel free, anybody who wants to reach out to me and discuss more. We can even do another podcast to discuss specific topics about this. But the summary is, is that you need to find someone who’s getting poor reimbursement from the local utility company. There are lots of private power producers. I wouldn’t say lots. If there were lots, it’d be really easy to find cheap power. Find people who own … And this is what I did, I found a gentleman who owns his own hydroelectric dam privately.

Scott Offord: Nice.

Richard Camara: I went to him directly and I said, “What are you getting from the utility company?” And what you have to do is you have to find someone who’s getting low enough reimbursement from the utility company that you can offer them a better deal by mining cryptocurrency.

Scott Offord: That makes total sense.

Richard Camara: Yeah. And you have to find a guy that’s trustworthy too because technically, if you’re going to go to him and say, “I’ll pay you this amount of free electricity …” Let me give you the math on the location I have found so that it makes sense. This guy, he had a four and a half cent contract per kilowatt hour, which is actually really good selling to the utility company. And then they would distribute it to the grid and sell it for, for instance, I don’t know, 13 cents, right? That’s how they made profit. But the utility company will pay him based on the contract that he has, and this guy’s contract got renewed down to three cents.

Scott Offord: Oh, wow.

Richard Camara: So in this perfect storm of him having to lay off an employee to help manage his dam, which makes about one megawatt, which went from … He was making about $500,000 a year of revenue or 450,000. I’m just saying, this is just rough estimate. When it goes to three cents, it correlated to 300,000. So he lost $150,000 of revenue a year. And through networking and talking with people, I found out everybody in their own region, if you want to do this, you got to find out who is producing private power. I don’t know how you do that, I got lucky. I just talk a bunch

Richard Camara: A guy at my soccer field networked me to another guy and to another guy, and this is how I stumbled upon this guy. But there are people that are getting poor reimbursement from the utility company. In my example three cents now with the new contract, I’m going to offer this gentleman anything above three cents. Even if you do the calculation, if you can get a reliable, for instance, five cents, but this guy isn’t charging me rent and he’s given me property right there beside his hydroelectric dam, I can put it [crosstalk 00:30:23].

Scott Offord: And it can go up to one megawatt too, right?

Richard Camara: Yeah, exactly. One megawatt. And also, you’ve got to structure your deal. The guy I found is super reasonable. He’s charging me five cents. He doesn’t require any minimum usage. He doesn’t charge any rent. He’s going to give me an apartment when we get up to scale for somebody to actually stay at his hydroelectric dam and manage the facility. And he’s up to one megawatt.

Scott Offord: Yeah, I mean that’s a win, win, win for everybody, right?

Ethan Zurka: Yeah.

Richard Camara: Right. I guess as far as to any viewers and stuff, it’s possible. You just have to be … I guess I’m anecdotally saying it’s possible because I don’t have numerous examples of this. But what I can say is that in my situation, as I depressingly saw my revenue from my GPUs drop, which unfortunately even today I’m looking at the profit margins and I probably will turn my GPUs off right now. Just today even because Grin-31 and a couple others have just tanked just even today. That’s just market cycles. Maybe in another week I’ll turn them back on at residential rates.

Richard Camara: But what I’m doing is I’ve gotten permission to begin planning an ASIC based container build out as well as relocate all my GPU to this hydroelectric facility here in the next three to four months, which I don’t know who knows what catastrophic happens with the Bitcoin halfening as far as mining. I think that if you have high end S17s like the pro model, like the 73 terahash, I think you can weather through the halfening free safely at five cents. That’s my current plan is to start off small but hopefully hit about one megawatt container mining set up on this hydroelectric dam facility.

Scott Offord: That sounds awesome. Hopefully you can recuperate some of your GPO expenditures and-

Richard Camara: Yeah, I mean, even as old as my GPS are at five cents per [inaudible 00:32:10], I think I’ll be able to make some money back. I’ll come pretty close to catching up on my profit. But right now I’m just getting … I would say for the last … it’s pretty miserable at residential rates. I mean, I started this process of searching for cheaper power almost, I want to say a year ago, and this specific owner was not interested in doing business with me until we just kept talking. And then the final conclusion was, why am I going to hurt myself? He didn’t want to do business, but then he was like, “You’re speaking to me. So it’s going to benefit you, Richard. You’re going to get cheaper power rates, but then I’m going to make more. So it’s a win-win.” Find a place where, because you’re running a business of cryptocurrency mining, the people that you’re paying are happy.

Richard Camara: It’s a win-win. Don’t go somewhere and try to steal power or go to an environment where … Well, I mean, here’s the thing. My twin brother and I have done a lot of research, but there are areas like Wenatchee, Washington, Grant County where it’s actually an adversarial environment to go. Even though the electrical rates, historically, have been as low as two cents there, the community, and the boards, and the committees and everything that run those almost community beneficial hydroelectric dams, thousands of megawatts, it’s actually an adversarial relationship where they don’t want cryptocurrency miners pulling power at two cents. So, go somewhere, find somewhere where the utility company is paying a privately owned or even a business owned-

Scott Offord: Look for private power generation [crosstalk 00:33:52].

Richard Camara: Exactly.

Scott Offord: … if you can find an opportunity in that.

Richard Camara: And pay them more. But you don’t have to pay them a lot more because I’m telling you, the difference between three and four cents is huge to a producer. They’re producing so much power. Like I said, the guy I’m talking with, when I mine in his facility and hit one megawatt, I’m going to make him as much as 200,000 more dollars a year. He wants nothing to do with crypto mining. He says, “I produce power.” Find a relationship like that and you have done great. And I think it’s possible.

Richard Camara: You can go on public even utility websites for different states, and you can look up and you can see what the standard recommended reimbursement rate for power producers is. And if you find a state that has, for instance, two point five cents of reimbursement, who cares if you’re obnoxious? Just reach out to every power producer you can find and say, “Hey, are you willing to meet with me? I can pay you more money than what the utility company is paying you.”

Scott Offord: Right. That’s an awesome idea, Richard.

Ethan Zurka: Yeah.

Richard Camara: Yeah.

Scott Offord: Well, hey Richard, I know it’s been a long day for you because you’re doing this crypto thing full time, and also the radiology thing full time, but thanks. Just tell us, how can our listeners reach out to you, and how can they find you online?

Richard Camara: Yeah, I mean, I’ll put out my email. I know this is pretty brash, but just throwing it out there. It’s [email protected]. Last name is C-A-M-A-R-A. Shoot me an email if you liked what you were hearing on here and you want to chat more. I have Twitter accounts Camaratwinrc, C-A-M-A-R-A-T-W-I-N-R-C. I don’t use Twitter that much, so basically just email me, and I can share all my other contact info. We can chat, talk-

Scott Offord: Great.

Richard Camara: … collaborate. Yeah.

Scott Offord: Yeah. Well, that’s great [crosstalk 00:35:49].

Richard Camara: I can help anyone else out there networking to hopefully give them even more specific tips on finding the cheaper power that you guys crave.

Scott Offord: Yep. Awesome. Well, thanks for your time, and have a good night.

Ethan Zurka: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:36:06] thanks again Richard.

Richard Camara: Thanks guys. Yeah, I really appreciate the invite. Yeah, have a great evening guys.

Ethan Zurka: All right.

Scott Offord: See you. All right thanks again to NovaBlock mining pool, the North American based mining pool that launched in August 2019. Check out novablock.com, and if you sign up on the top right in of their website, you can enter the code offord18, that’s O-F-F-O-R-D-1-8, for a permanent reduction of mining fees all the way down to 1.8%. Depending on how much hash rate you can put at them, you can probably even lock in an even lower rate than that. So check it out. Thank you to our sponsor, novablock.com.