JP Baric is the founder and CEO of MiningStore, a well-established technology company that hosts cryptocurrency miners. JP became interested in cryptocurrency as a freshman in high school and by his junior year was mining on a large-scale. In 2015 he launched MiningStore and quickly built a reputation for manufacturing some of the highest-quality rigs on the market. Today, JP is one of the leading experts on cryptocurrency mining and is a frequent guest and contributor on industry-leading outlets. He regularly consults with Fortune 500 companies on high-value projects and has developed large-scale commercial mining facilities.
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Transcription
All right. Welcome everybody to the crypto mining tools podcast. We have your host here, Scott offered and your cohost, Ethan, circa. Hi everybody, everybody. And today our special guest, JP Barrick. You guys welcome to the show. Yeah. So today we have a really exciting episode and JP has, has been in the mining space for a while longer than I am. I’m like maybe twice his age. But he’s in mining longer than me. How old are you JP? I am 22. Wow, that’s crazy. And you are like creating this empire of your own already.
Yeah, it’s been it’s been a lot of work over the past really five, five years of mining and kind of figuring out where I wanted to end up in the space and what I want to work on. It’s really interesting to talk to people that are in traditional real estate and realize just how easy it is to access bank liquidity, how easy it is to access that type of capital when it comes to minors. You know, it’s something that I’ve never been able to experience in my life and it’s been an interesting thing just to kind of see in my opinion that really that discrimination from, from the banks and from the financial institution for the mining community and mining world as a young entrepreneur, you know, this is my first rodeo, my first really big business going at it and not being able to have those bankable assets has put a strain on just capital raising and made it a little bit challenging. But I think that’s the part of the part of the point of them doing it.
Yeah. Well that’s interesting. So, so I mean you, you’ve been dealing with lenders and all that. Your almost your whole life. I think the first experience you had was when you were 13 and you had to beg your mom for some money to buy into this internet money.
Thankfully had the money, cause I had a robotics camp that I was running so I had a Baker for her identity and was like, mom, you need to buy Bitcoin. I’ll give you the money. Don’t worry. And so that was, I’m thinking of easier sell because it wasn’t her money to lose, but she wasn’t very concerned about like losing her identity because the internet was a confusing thing in 2012, 2013 for people just on their desktops. So we have bought Bitcoin in Mt. Gox and then saw the writing on the wall that it was going to go down and took all of it off and then started the point you got out before the the fiasco happened with Mt. Gox yeah. In my opinion it was pretty obvious that it was going to happen maybe even a year before. Like it was pretty like, okay, this company’s not well-run.
There’s going to have liquidity problems there. You know, once the hack happened, it was like, okay, is it really going to be enough coins to get out? You know, thankfully it only had maybe 20 or 30 coins at the time on the site. So it wasn’t like it was a thousand holder and it was like a problem to withdraw my money. But yeah, definitely started self costing as fast as possible after kind of that hack. And then you had mint pal and cripsy and all these really old all clinics changes that were pop up and go down. MTX now is another good one that was very popular back in 2013, 2014 so yeah, just really understanding that self custody piece at an early age in the development
Without, you know, maybe making an endorsement in your idea. I mean, just for the noobs out there what would you recommend as an exchange for them to use? Because there are a lot of people now that I know of that I’m trying to help them, you know, get coin and things like that. And, you know, I know my, you know, what I have a preference for, but I’m just curious since you’ve been in it for so long, you know, do you have a preference?
I actually, I do have a preference on exchanges. I have, I, you know, used to love, I used to be a big proponent of Gemini, then their fees are just, you know, way too high for anyone who’s normally buying coin. And I actually recently just started using to gummy I really liked their platform and matches with all the other exchanges. It does a very good job. Like if you sell three or four Bitcoins you’re maybe going to pay out a hundred dollars fee. It’ll match for the OTC providers as well. It’ll match with different exchanges and get you the best rate on your, on your order. And it feels very quickly. I’ve seen that it’s a very fast trading engine. So that’s what I tell people to go to now and it’s in the U S traditional base backed by some big VCs. So they’re, you know, they’re well backing and I was one of their very first customers and really enjoy the, the company and the software and the ambulance to support. That’s great. Like wires are almost sometimes instantly like all custom wire and it’ll be in my bank the same day and I’m like, and like an hour later I’m like, how is that even possible?
What about I think it’s called ACH transfers.
Yeah. Those, you know, those take longer. Usually like three to five days. I think they have those. But just, you know, for funds, I usually use the wire transfer method. Okay. But I like it cause like you can, like you can withdraw the money at 9:00 AM and it’ll be in your bank at nine 30 and it’s like, I’ve never seen it. That is very nice. That is very handy. After you’re done trading, you can sell and pay your power bill, they 60.
Right? Yeah. Well that’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that service before, but it’s nice to hear that it is a us based company.
Yeah. I mean for people in the U S you know, like we, we like our U us financial protection and it’s hard for us to give that away. And even our data protection also, if you’re not in the U S it’s very hard to serve us customers, especially the Fiat bridge there. So, you know, usually I suggest that and people that are just like not very serious traders. I say cash app, it’s quick and easy to get Bitcoin. It’s great at a bar to be a little, Hey, you have Bitcoin now, awesome here by $10. I’ll bet you all buy $10 too. That’s awesome. And you
Said, Oh, let’s just go back here. Breton was asking, what’s the name of that exchange? And you said Tagami
Yep. To go meet T a. G. O. M
Yeah. Yeah. I believe we’ve got it in the the chat there. And now do they have a lot of different coins there or is it kind of like Coinbase where, you know, they’ve only got, you know, 10 or 12 coins, like
They have I would say at least 15 trading, like 15 point different trading pairs. So it’s not a thousand like finance, but it is a decent amount.
Now, finance is kind of overwhelming to me. I would not recommend that to a new,
Yeah, they actually, the only reason I use finance is to exchange between a USBC and U S DT when I’m paying a supplier maybe over in China, cause they, they really like USDA TT. But it’s really easy for me to go from like USD to BTC and, you know, whatever, maybe on Coinbase and then transfer that over to finance to that and exchange over to something else.
Yeah, yeah. I’ve never had a good way to do that. So now I need to make finance.
Finance also really has really good fees. So, you know, if, if I’m going to do a large trade I will tend to try to make it happen over in the finance world and not in the Coinbase world. I mean, they, they all have their pluses and minuses. And so that’s why I was just really curious, like in your experience and, and you seem, you know, well-researched, you know, you’ve, you’ve kinda been around since I guess the beginning, like the people before you were like, you know, mathematicians and nobody’s even heard of anymore, you know, so you know, the OGs, you know, you know Charlie Shrem and, and, you know. Yeah. Right. so I mean, that’s really awesome and that’s really awesome that, you know, you, you discovered it, I believe. How did you find out about cryptocurrencies? And Bitcoin. Like what, what convinced you as you know, a young teenager like this is something I want to try. This is something I’ve got to do. Cause most teenagers I know are just like, you know, I want to play my video games or I want to listen to my music with the distorted auto tune and, and you know, doing, doing weird things. So yeah,
For me, why did I get into this space and what was like the intrigue? So when I was 13, 14 years old, I was coming in freshman year in high school and we compare our laptops to school, which was amazing. So no one would have, I didn’t, I didn’t pay attention in class really. Most of my classes didn’t pay attention. It was an early college I went to, there was only 50 kids, all guys in this high school freshman year. So we’re, we’re on our computers and kind of just playing around and you’re reading, you know, news articles and trying to always figure out what am I doing here. I got a lot of free time and I ended up on this article about Bitcoin on tech crunch. Found out that it looked really cool. I was like, this seems cool. Internet money.
Like why, why not money on the internet then went in the rabbit hole of learning what their point was and trying to get some, which I wasn’t able to successfully do, but I was able to learn a lot. Learned about the visiting General’s problem, you know, was reading Wikipedia about where money started, why and why we have money, what Bitcoin is, how, you know, where the white paper kind of went down that and most people, but a lot of those had a rabbit hole of a Bitcoin and over about eight weeks started started learning more and more. Then finally got some amount Gox. And I think for me why resonated with me is because at a young age I really, I, I, I guess I identified as almost like a libertarian and I really value like free speech and being able to hold a strong conviction of what I believe to be true.
And I believe that, you know, money is backed by hard work and that, you know, you need to put in, you know, time and have an thought in temp debt or some instrument working for you to be able to really keep this, this cash worth something, this dollar in our pocket. And at a young age, I’m trying to figure out why does this dollar we all say is worth $1 have real worth. And that kind of led me down. My men mentioned that money path. So I started to understanding like how important data and financial privacy was, how important Bitcoin’s role is in the future when we have a, you know, really just massive amounts of, of inflation and printing of money and then recent coven 19 stimulus packages out from, into wazoo. And yeah, it’s been a way to really protect myself from a monetary system that works for me instead of against me.
And I’d be like, that’s how I view Bitcoin is it’s a system that has allowed me to travel the world as a young, at a young age. It’s allowed me to, to live on the Bitcoins that I’ve owned. I’ve never had to work at like a nine to five job that I didn’t want to work. You know, for money just directly. I was able to be you know, use my time to really educate myself about where the space was going and build in the space, which was something that I don’t think would be possible without the kind of like economics and incentives that Bitcoin provides, people that use it. And so my, my classmates, you know, I tried to get them into Bitcoin. Eventually they all jumped in and I would say, no, not all of them, but maybe kind of the 50, actually the ones who didn’t are just like, why didn’t I listen to him?
It’s honestly, I wish that too, but after eight years, seven years of preaching Bitcoin, it still hasn’t got the adoption. Even in my own family. I would ask the question, I was like, so who’s using their stimulus money to buy Bitcoin in one of the world? Just got, everyone in the U S has got this money, you know, that’s going to be worth less because it’s just was printed. No one had to work for it. You didn’t have to work for your money. You just got interested in a couch and it still hasn’t clicked yet. There’s still a wise Bitcoin valuable. I don’t get it. So I’m hoping over the next four years we’ll really have a wake up of people, especially in my younger generation that are starting to question you know, what type of money they’re using and why they should care about that. Yeah. I really, really hope that’s true. I absolutely hope that’s true.
No, and that’s really interesting that you say that. You know, talking about inflation w one of the things that I had in my mind was, okay, so the U S Prince trillions of dollars and then they decide to give a little portion of that to only people in the United States. Right? Which, so what does that do to people that live in other countries that are depending on the, the fact that, you know, the, the world is basically run off of this us dollar standard that, you know, they, they didn’t get this extra money when it was printed, but everybody else in America did.
Yeah, I did not get any, any stimulus. I’m putting it out there. I haven’t gotten my check either. It says on the IRS came school like we don’t know who you are basically like you JP. Yeah. But on Scott to your question I don’t, I think you know, worldwide when we’re printing a lot of money, the U S is the leading leading force and the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. We saw that with the flight, you know, not into yen when this Cobra 19, I would want a dollars. I was actually reading Palm’s newsletter this morning and he was talking about Lebanon and how the price there is falling of their currency. You know, they’re releasing restrictions. There’s riots on the street. People can’t buy milk, people can’t buy food. So my guess is that scenario will occur in multiple countries over the next four years.
Similar to what it did in Argentina, Venezuela, you know, oil prices being what they are. They’re, they’re struggling. There’s these countries that have really nowhere to turn and it’ll be very interesting to see where the people turn to. I don’t know, I don’t think the governments will turn to Bitcoin, but the people that, that’s where, you know, I hope that they, that the resources and tools, the onboarding systems that we’ve been building the Fiat automatics for the past eight years as the industry has matured, I hope that’s where the people turn. I hope they start to realize that until I get control of my money, I’m not going to have control of my freedom of my life, my day to day tasks and what I’m doing, how I’m spending my time. Because it’s, if you don’t have control of your financial freedom, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re almost like a hamster stuck in a cage. You know, always trying to get the, get that next dollar to pay that next bill. And a lot of us would feel like that at some times. And it’s because we have these really big external pressures that are working against us in, you know, inflation, interest rates, big macro forces of energy really, that are making it hard for everyone to function in a society where if you’re not, if you’re not up by the faucet per se, you’re, you know, it’s not easy.
Yeah. Well that’s, that’s an interesting analogy. You know at the faucet, I know you guys as a company are working on some interesting things and we can talk about that soon. But you, you did mention oil, you know, and I guess what I was learning this week is that really everything comes down to oil, like the entire world. Yeah. Energy,
But, but definitely like oil. You know, it makes the world run, eh, everybody needs it. Yeah. And, and so yeah. W what are you like with the oil sucker conversation and it’s like, it’s really, it is eye opening to understand how much the world is run and back my energy and oil. And I didn’t realize that until we ended up hiring a consultant who helps build these power plants. And this was about a year ago, and we realized how this whole space is built, how energy companies build these massive billion dollar projects, how they’re funded, who, who’s exactly putting up the capital for them, who is, you know, who’s buying the power and understanding this whole economics of the energy system and understand that energy. The industry is usually the biggest industry. Most countries, it’s not banking, it’s not tech. It’s energy.
Because we all need power. We all run day to day on electricity and fuels our life. What I think what’s going to happen though is over the next, it’s gonna be a long time, but over the next 10 2030 years, we’re really moving from currency backed by oil, the U S dollar to currency backed by electrons like Bitcoin and other currencies that are using minors, which in my eyes is the really the basic definition of work, putting electricity, creating heat. Really it’s creating energy and using it. So being able to provably create energy at a cheap price and use that energy is kind of really important for Bitcoin and Bitcoin. It has value. It has maintained its value. It’s because we’re really questioning what is money backed by, should it be backed by oil, should be backed by gold or should be backed by electrons, which are free to, you know, anyone can make one and as long as you understand how to make energy and if that, that price will keep coming down on the cost to create energy and the cost to consume it as well. With these Bitcoin miners, they’ll get more efficient and the system will continue to run. So I’m excited for what that, how that shift happens and when that occurs.
So you know a lot about mining and the mining space. I imagine you, you’ve been doing it for quite some time. Can you tell us how that began? So we know, we know the story of like how you got your first Bitcoin, when did you say, you know, Hey, I can buy these machines and I don’t have to go to exchange anymore. I can actually use these machines to mine my own coin.
Yeah. So it was shortly after the whole Bitcoin kind of the whole purchase of the Bitcoins for me. I was a tech nerd in high school and I loved building computers. I loved like working with graphics cards and understanding how to, how to, how to make money from computers. So I was selling them on Craigslist and basically buying computers, like buying parts, putting them together,
Building like mining rigs. And you were selling them?
Yeah. Well yeah, that’s awesome. But off without mining, it was more just like normal computers. And then eventually we got to mining rigs and yeah, I was building them, running them in my basement out of like the shoe box. It’s kind of like the shoe crate type of style where you’d like five graphics cards across, have a motherboard. I had two rigs in my basement. I had to run some new power down there. And then eventually it got big enough where I built a shed in the backyard and then we moved to a facility.
What was your mom thinking about all this? Like, Oh, there’s JP with this damn computers again. And
I think my parents were just very, they were supportive. They didn’t really support where it was going, but they were supportive. They were like, you know, he’s not asking us for to pay these bills. He’s paying the power bill. You know, Ford’s my minors, he’s, he’s making this digital currency like I have to do that. He’s not going to jail. He’s not smart. He’s not murdering people.
He should be out there getting high with his friends. What’s he doing in that shit? Been and all that electricity on.
I know, man. But yeah, it was, I went down that route of just building miners and selling them and that’s kind of how the early days of mining store started. We did a a million dollars in revenue and in I think two months in 2017 in my basement. Wow. It was, it was like, wow. Okay. This is, maybe I should look at dropping out of school then.
Yeah. That’s wild. That is wild, man.
Let’s talk about that in one second here. But first, Ethan, why don’t you tell us how, how we’re able to actually keep this podcast running. And
Yes, I want to give a big shout out to BraiinsOS. For those of you who don’t know, our miners come with a firmware that is from the factory and just like your iPhone can be jailbroken that firmware can be replaced with a better operating system. This operating system will open up the performance of your minor and allow you to see metrics and aspects of the minor that the factory firmware doesn’t let you do. And there are two different versions. One is completely open source and then the other I believe is an enterprise version. And the enterprise version of BraiinsOS gives you even greater control. And this is really good for large mining farms who have a lot of pass rate. And it allows you to clock down your miners to make them more efficient when the price and value of Bitcoin is low. So you’re, you’re getting the most amount of Bitcoin for the least amount of energy, and when the price of Bitcoin parabolics up and skyrockets, it allows you to turn on the juice with your miners and get the maximum hash rate out of them so you can get the maximum coin. So yeah, do you sell as a favor? Go and unlock your minors if you’re not doing this, you are not mining properly.
Yeah, well said. So yeah, thanks to BraiinsOS for sponsoring our podcast and, and we’re just very excited to be able to share their product with you guys and their service. I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about firmware on his podcast with JP just because he has a, an interesting situation where he’s actually testing out new firmware himself. You know, there’s, there’s other firmware like this guy vnish provides. But yeah, so, but BraiinsOS, they had definitely have a great ecosystem and then they also have their, their Slushpool as well. Where I can’t remember if you already mentioned this or not,
I didn’t know I was going to let you mention that. But yes, if you use BraiinsOS and you also use Slushpool, which they’re part of, you will get 50% lower mining fees. And this is a huge thing, you know, because not only are you getting the benefit that the firmware gives you, but you’re also getting a reduction and you know, your pool fees. And so it’s a win win both ways.
Yeah. And so that’s on they’re a plus version. So that’s the corporate version. Yeah. Yep. All right, so let’s get back here.
So JP, you know, obviously you’re, you’re very well versed in this industry. You’ve, you’ve been around since the beginning and I just have to tip my hat to you for being 22 and being so far ahead of the curve. I mean, most, most people your age are just now getting out of school. And even if they don’t have a PhD, they still have a PhD. They have a pretty huge debt of student loans that they have to pay back. And you know, you’ve just you’ve cut your own path, you’ve forged your own way, and your, your knowledge is just impeccable about our financial system and, and awareness about that. I think that’s one thing that schools should really teach us more about is, you know, what is money and how does it operate in, in an economy. Cause most people just think, you know, it’s a dollar.
I have a dollar, I spend a dollar. And that’s all it is. It’s just an addition and subtraction. It has, it has no concept. It has no understanding beyond that. But it really is, you know, money is one thing. Equity is another thing. Assets are another thing. And people just don’t know about all the different varieties of value that exists. And you, you seem to know a lot about that and that’s just amazing. So you know, tell us about your operations now. Tell us about you know, what you’re doing to, to maximize your returns.
Yeah, so right now we have two mining sites that are currently operational. One is in New York and it’s just a mining container. And then another one is in Iowa and that site has a building on it and two mining containers. It’s about 5.4 megawatts total and capacity. And yeah, we have a bunch of the Avalon machines running there and some, a lot of us nines. It’s been, it’s been a journey really building out a site in Iowa. Container sites are fairly easy to deploy. You know, there’s not much planning project planning infrastructure there. You’re connecting, you know, which gear and some benches from transformer to your container box and deploying it over a couple of days. But building out a building was a, was a challenge. It’s definitely was a, was an interesting way to approach mining facilities.
We were having some issues just getting the containers fully deployed on time. And so we decided, Hey, we need to go ahead and move forward with a larger infrastructure play. Something that can be set up faster than containers. And we, we, we got the building set up very quickly, but the actual filling out of the building, the electrical PDQs work, the wiring there in installing the switch gear, kind of the, the shelves and fan deployment and then actually putting the miners and the shelves really up to kind of racking and stacking the miners. It was, it was a, it took a lot of time, partially because I was not on the site. We had you know, other employees out here that were technicians. We had some help from local people here in Iowa that wanted, that kind of brought us to Iowa and Bravos to contract with power companies.
And they, they, they wanted to do a lot more, I guess, involvement in the project that we were expecting. So there was some project management issues there getting the site up and running fully. But it was a great learning experience and we’re happy we’re able to now, you know, take everything we learned and scale it to future sites. Right now on the site, we have, like I mentioned, a lot of SIS running previously kind of going into the BraiinsOS thing. We were running Asics here, which I’ve been using for about, I would say we’ve been using it for about six months. Actually four months on the, on the software for the [inaudible] software. And then recently because of actually my podcast appearance, we were asked to this, this podcast appearance today. Yes. We were asked to basically remove that software from the minors because we were not hashing at their appropriate rate.
According to ACX here. And it was not high enough hash rate per Watts per terahash. The machines weren’t all running. Of course these are machines that have been running for four years now, you know, have been in the ecosystem for a long time. And also the not our highest priority. As you mentioned, we are working on things that are, you know, trying to change the fundamental beliefs of money and the core system. So we, we had to move off of that, that offset operating system. We were, we were basically forced to move either to make a decision, either come on the podcast or don’t. If you come on the podcast, we’re going to kick you off this. All your minors will stop working. And if you if you don’t, if you’re not going to podcast well we’ll give you a discount on your fees. And that really didn’t sit well for me, especially as I mentioned earlier, you know, being, having, let me, let me get this straight. This podcast that we’re talking about right now was being held over your head
As you know, like extortion to like if, if you go on this podcast, you will lose business with us basically.
Yeah. Basically. And not only lose business, but I, you know, I will have to spend my tech time, my time resolving the issue. And what I kind of was said was that I was like, no, I don’t appreciate you questioning like calendar. Like this is just coming in and saying, Hey, you can’t get in this meeting. Like, you can’t have this meeting with this person unless we’re going to cut you off completely. And that was, that was hard because for, for my relationship with six years, I was one of the first users of the West, which was the software before I had a 300 GPU mining facility back in, you know, when they watched it, 20 1526 I guess 2016 with equity, Ethereum. And so to see that like, Hey, I can’t even use your software anymore, you just have to be kind of like ripped out was, it was very hard for me as I mentioned, cause I liked, you know, data privacy.
I like my own software so I’m glad the community was able to help out those. Scott was great. He was able to help motivate some people and just let them know about the story. And then they came and they were able to help upgrade some of the machines to newer software. Of course, you know, they’re not going to be running until the end after the having 15 days from now, but you know, they need to make that money for the next 15 days. Especially for men. Majority of the miners are ourselves, but we have a small about maybe 5%, 10% of those machines running for customers.
Yeah. Yeah. Well thanks for sharing your story about that. It just a little bit of background. The reason for this, the reason why he received that threat was because I had said something negative about execs year that the, the owner of a six year it felt it was not true. And I had an inkling that
It seems though Scott isn’t really negative if you are just literally like reporting information that someone else has told you.
Right. Yeah. So I had reiterated something that somebody had told me about a six year and that, that got the owner pretty upset. And it’s kinda started this little battle. So, so now as of yesterday April 27th on their website, they have this disclaimer saying, you know, kinda like a terms of for service thing. If you associate with certain types of people if you know you are a scammer or if you run a Ponzi scheme, whatever, you know, all these different guidelines. Saying that if we feel that we don’t want to work with you anymore, we’re going to not work with you. And the interesting thing is, okay, you know, they, they have some protections built in one of them being that they’re technically not cutting you off themselves, right? So they say they say that they are going to stop accepting your fees so that they’re going to stop taking their cut from the, the dev fee that is on those machines and because they’re going to refuse taking your money that’s going to activate some sort of a, a kill switch over.
We’ll just talk to your school. Right. So to me, I don’t know that that just brings up this really interesting concept that I don’t know if a lot of miners are thinking about being that. Yeah. I think JP, you said it earlier you know, not, not your firmware, not your minors. Right. so yeah, it just kinda brings up this whole new thing that we have to think about. So if we’re going to be installing third party software, what are some of these kinds of concerns that we have to be looking at?
Yeah, absolutely. JP. I mean you brought in the whole fact that, you know, Bitcoin was, it was emotionless. It, it took out the human equation, right? So in, should, should we now welcome back in a human equation into an industry that’s trying to free us from that.
Wow. That is, that’s, that’s big. I mean I think with mining at the end of the day it’s, I mean every business has that human equation, but with mining it can be potentially removed. Like there’s a lot of things that can be done with machines. And really at the end of the day, the way I view mining is just as an interest tool and a great debt based investment. So I do, it is hard though when you have, you know, miners running software and you’re trusting the developer, they’re providing you a good service. But then something like, in my opinion, political, like a debate, you know, this debate that’s happening. And I actually, it was funny cause I saw the debate, I saw Scott’s comments earlier in a private group chat on regarding firmware regarding this. And I specifically told myself, I do not want to get involved with this. I don’t have time for this. And the next thing you know, a week later I have like mailed up. I’m like, Oh, this is great. I love it. Like the universe knew I had to be in there. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so that, it’s an interesting concept. You know, you have these ASIC mining manufacturers that have their firmware and you know, when you buy the miner, it comes with this firmware on it and you just connect it to the pool and you can start making Bitcoin. Right. and each of these miners might have a slightly different version of that firmware on their, on their ASX. But they, a lot of them are based on, while most of them, or maybe not all, all of them except for a Slushpool are built on CG minor. Okay. So yeah, you have these different things. A year ago or so, there was the concern about ant bleed where mean potentially could, if they wanted to, they could shut off all the miners in the world or select Meyers that are mining, which brought up the question, well, you know, what if the Chinese government is involved with bit main what China wanted to kind of take over the cryptocurrency and cause a problem, China could force bit Maine to do something like that or bit main could just choose to do it kind of underhandedly without anybody really realizing what’s happening, you know?
And that just kinda brought up the whole question to me about firmware and about open source and about you know, mining and how easily or, or how difficult it might be to prevent somebody from, from doing this. You know, whether it’s a government stepping in and saying, Hey, you know maybe United States doesn’t like Venezuela making money on Bitcoin. So, so let’s figure out some way to restrict them from being able to mind. Right. So, so yeah, I don’t know. JP, what are your thoughts on, on that whole concept?
Well, as you mentioned, it did come into the public eye about a bout a year ago with, with ASIC boost and over AC Bruce and all that. I think it’s, it’s hard and we’ve seen that software on devices, manufacturers giving, even Samsung saying, okay, we’re only gonna do four years of, you know, phone upgrades and governments saying you need to do eight or you need to do six and now we have devices all over the world that are useless. And in crypto miners, you know, it’s four years, basically four to five years until those machines are done. So what is the manufacturer’s responsibility not only to repair the machines as we saw what they mean recently just said, Hey, all these old models were no longer repairing for your service tickets in by, you know, 10 days from now basically. So we’re seeing that, you know, obviously the manufacturer has to ensure the product is maintained and supported.
Even for us, we get calls for our GPU money systems. We sold in 2017 people will ask for support on those. And, you know, my technicians now don’t work on GPU machines, so they don’t have the type of feedback that they can. They send them the guide we put together back then. And that’s about as much support as we can offer. It’s a lot from a manufacturing standpoint to offer support on the software, fixing vulnerabilities that come up, you know, throughout the years. And then in addition the hardware and maintaining that and trying to provide support and replacement parts for that. So for me, I think that we have to really, I think last year we realized that there are integral parts of the ecosystem, the software and the miners themselves and they need to be separate. Before they were joint everyone, you know, people didn’t really think about it much.
Now we’ve separated those and I hope that manufacturers start to open source their software. I mean, Canon has mentioned it multiple times that they will happen. I have a bunch of Avalon machines, so let me know when they do, cause I’d love to work, you know, getting good monitoring tools for them. Their systems they have in place are not the best for managing large mines. But what we’re seeing is that these tools are being kind of community built to provide value to the end and are being maintained well by the community. And I think that’s a great opportunity for a lot of developers in the space because one thing people don’t realize is that minors are always making money, might be, might be losing money at the end of day, but Myers are always producing revenue. When that mind is plugged in, it’s always making money. Therefore there’s always a fee for a developer to take some, take some of that and, and to basically build good software for this space, which is, which is lacking still.
That’s interesting. Yeah. Because when the developer takes her developer fee, they don’t have to sell that immediately to to pay for their electricity bill. So if they wanted to, they could maybe scale up or down their development speed and, and maybe save it for another time where, where, you know, maybe they want to cash it in two months from now instead of right now. Well, Bitcoin’s low. So yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting concept.
Yeah, it definitely is. And management of crypto is one of the hardest things to do well as a minor. Risk management is what I’ve been focused on a lot. With the understanding of crypto understanding of Bitcoin and then kind of understanding of defy and now how do you produce longterm purchase contracts of hash rate? Really, I think that’s the question that I’m asking myself on a daily, daily basis. And the question that is you know, quickly becoming a real need in this space and a real gap to fill kind of, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the whole financing of minors is very difficult because of the stability of the industry. Even though in my opinion, pick for mining has the opportunity and potentially is the best debt-based investment, the most stable debt based investment out there. For, for infrastructure, for institutions to come into
JP, this, this has been a fascinating and enlightening conversation and I wish it could go on and on and on forever and ever because I’m sure we have, we have so many things that we haven’t even really even touched yet. You know, we haven’t touched like, you know, what your future thoughts are going to happen on the happening. What do you see four years out? You know, we have so many other things that we could talk about, so many different other paths we can go. But I would like to now ask you, you know, how can people in our audience reach out to you if they want to continue the conversation? What’s a good way that they can contact you and yeah, get in touch.
Yeah. For me I used to have a Twitter. It was at JP bear no longer have that Twitter. I’m trying to get it back. I don’t know what happened to it. So the best way to contact me is probably we have, we have an email newsletter that go on miningstore.com, submit the contact us form there and that’ll get you on the newsletter. And the sales list, if you’re an investor and institutional investor just let us know and we’ll put you on a different list where we send out high level energy level related podcast and I’ll actually send Scott something to put in the show notes that has like a direct sign up for those newsletters. So easier for people. But that’s the best way to keep in touch with me. If you want to follow me on Instagram at JP Baric telegram @miningstore. So yeah, I appreciate it.
All right, that is awesome. That is fantastic. And I’m glad you’re a part
Of our industry because one of these days I’m going to need to retire and I can hand the reins over to you. There we go. Awesome. Yeah. Well JP, thanks for coming on and telling us your story. Yeah, I think we should have you on maybe again in the near future, and we could talk more about economics and the mining community and just some of your other projects that you’re working on outside of USA as well. Yeah, very interesting stuff that, that mining soar is doing these days. And the only person I’ve actually met that was a minor when they were a minor. There you go. Yeah. You stole my line, the mining since he was a minor. Right. JP, thanks for coming on. Thanks. We’ll talk to you guys again. Take care. Bye. Bye.