Tony Gertz works for a private company as a disaster planning consultant. He first became involved in cryptocurrency mining in the later half of 2012. He began his hobby, which later transformed into a part-time side gig, with 2 Butterfly Labs FPGAs and some GPU-based Litecoin mining rigs. Since then, he has upscaled his bookshelf operation to over 50 ASICs at various colocation facilities across the country. Throughout the growth of his mining company he has experienced the numerous ups and downs that have plagued the cryptocurrency community. Of most recent note has been his difficulties in selecting dedicated, competent, and experienced colocation facilities to host his miners.
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Transcription
We are live. Welcome everybody to the crypto mining tools podcast. We’re here today with our cohost Ethan. Hey everyone. Ethan [inaudible] and I’m your host, Scott offered. And our guest today is Tony Gertz. Is that right? Tony? Correct. Right. We’re, we’re really happy to have you today because, you know, normally we’re interviewing the providers, you know, the, the people that are offering services and people with products. But today we really wanted to talk to you about the opposite end of that being you know, coming from a customer’s point of view. And, you know Tony, you had contacted me, I think it was on email or telegram and you had just mentioned, you know, you’ve had some really bad experiences and you finally have come up with some good experiences in the minor hosting realm. And I had asked you, Hey, what, why don’t you write some of that out for me so I can review it and kind of understand what you’re talking about and what the timeline is.
So you did. And when I got that email from you it was very, very interesting to hear what you had to say. And so I shared it with my team with Ethan as well, and it was a real, real learning experience for us just to hear some of the issues that that can be come up upon as a, as a customer of a hosting facility or multiple hosting facilities. So yeah, Tony, we are glad to have you here. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself and, you know we like to just understand how you got into the space in the first place. What got you into Bitcoin, things like that. So,
Yeah. Well back in 2012, basically had a, a friend mentioned this whole Bitcoin thing and I thought he was kind of crazy because I don’t understand, I’m not, how do you have something like that and have it be secure? It’s digital. Everything can be, you know, somebody can find a way and looked into the technology and I thought, Oh, okay, this is what this solves. So I decided to sort of pursue it as just sort of a hobby on the side. And I built the GPU rig and you know, grew up with computers. I’m not a programmer or a hardware engineer by any means. But I’m, I’m pretty tech savvy, so I built a, a four GPU GPU rig back in 2012 and yeah. Converted it to light coin later on, things like that. And I managed to get in pretty early in the pre-buy for some butterfly labs products.
Right. I, I got lucky in that if anybody’s familiar with that whole ordeal, but managed to get, get my two units and quickly resell them on eBay before a flip. I mean, I didn’t want to, but that, that whole ordeal was such a mess. So yeah. And then you know, bought some bit main products here and there, but I was just a home miner essentially as a hobby. And of course, that all changed when everything really started taking off. Right. Right. Changed. And then I was sitting here going, I don’t think this is just a hobby anymore and I’m going to buy some more miners and buy them in bulk and figure out what I can do with them and where they need to go. And right. So that put me down the path of looking out for looking for co-location facilities and places where I could you know, store them in mind with them.
Now, were you one of those rare people that back in the day were able to mine five Bitcoin a day? Did you, did you ever accomplish that a five a day? I don’t think I was doing five a day. But gosh, you know, I’m sure, I’m sure everybody in this space can look back at some point in time and say, why was I selling these for $10 to try to get my money back? You know? Right. But it is what it is. Right? We all should have bought McDonald’s or IBM or Apple or, that’s really awesome. So you know, after reading your stories, Tony, I personally can relate a lot to the things that you’d mentioned, the pitfalls that you’ve experienced. I’ve actually experienced myself. So can you share a little bit with the audience about that? Yeah. Do you just want me to start chronologically?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. We’ll talk about the provider in Canada later I guess. But my, my first, my, my, my first formative experience was with a provider out of Washington and I think it was a smaller operation is the experience I get, cause it wasn’t this person’s only only job, right. You can Google them and see that they were programmer and did other things which didn’t actually affect the service, the tech support side of service, you know, in terms of reboots or things like that. But what, what I ran into trouble with there and that situation was when my contract was up. And I guess the, the way a lot of these colocation facilities have prices, at least from my perspective, I’m looking at this now for three years, is you know that they’re not charging you their base rate of electric plus 10% or plus 20%.
They’re also adjusting based on price. So yes. Yeah. So this, this provider I had locked into a six month con or, well, we were going to lock into a contract and then he didn’t want to, so it would have been benefit in the end had we locked into a contract. So that was a month to month with like a last month prepaid. I think I was with him for about five or six months and prices had gone down and a number of my miners weren’t profitable. So I was like, let’s just pull them back and I’ll see if I can find another facility or maybe resell them and see what happens. But right now I’m just losing money. So I emailed him and said, I think this is the last month, you know, I have the down payment, you know, things change. Maybe we’ll look at a three and back up again, but I’m going to have to, you know, get them.
How many, how many minus was this? This wasn’t too many. I think this was about nine or 10. Just a number of a semester nights and sort of come along T ones and things like that. But has been like two and a half years ago, two years ago, roughly. So not a lot of minors. And the problem came into one once. He wanted to, once I was trying to get these shipped back to me, he, his responses were what took a long time, like a week. And normally his responses are within 24 or 48 hours for service end of things. And that’s why it was not surprising. So he first tried to convince me to mine at a loss with him, which just keep it going. Yeah. Which now I understand you’re foregoing the shipping costs. Sure. But they’re not gonna mind it.
A loss for you, cause I still have to pay you. It doesn’t make any sense. I might as well buy or whatever. So that was kind of a red flag. Like he must think I’m not very intelligent or don’t understand the whole thing. So that went on for like two or three weeks, like one email and then a week later he’d respond and then a week later he’d respond. And I told him, I’m like, I’ll buy the labels, I’ll make this as easy as possible. Like it’s in our contract about shipping units back. And it’s always in the contract. Like sometimes they’ll say, you know, cost $25 per miner. Or sometimes I’ll just say, you pay the shipping. And you know, if you’ve been with somebody for a year, they’re not really gonna charge you a packing fee or sometimes they do and it’s small.
I just, it’s part of the cost of doing business. So the miners were still running or were they still having to your pool? They, they hashed for that last month. Like, okay, my last month down payment. Right. While you were trying to get them secured as turned off and shipped back to you? They were still hashing because they were hashing out on the prepayment yes, yes or no. I didn’t start the ship them back portion until about a week until that was going to end. Okay. I think he might’ve, he might’ve emailed me and said, well, prices are stable. Do you still want to stay with me now? I still want them back. So then I started this whole process. And yeah, he just tried to get me to mind with him and I told him I’d pay for the labels like the pickup.
Just let me know when I’m being flexible, trying to be as considered as possible, understanding that this isn’t everybody’s full time job and they can’t just, I can’t snap my fingers and my units get shipped back. But he then came up with this idea where I was going to send him a thousand dollars in Bitcoin. He was going to ship units back and return what was leftover to me, which again, kind of a odd thing. Yeah, exactly. Checking her out. Red flag. I’m not doing this. Are you kidding me? I was like, can you send me an invoice? Maybe that details all the costs at least. Yeah, I can send you. Yeah, at least and then I can send you just what that is. And of course it didn’t respond for a week, didn’t respond for a week. And then he asked me to mind with them again and all this. And eventually I was like, look, I, I mean I don’t know what it actually looked like to have to get a lawyer and threaten somebody with that. But I emailed him. I was like, look man, this is going to go legal and
It’s only, I have a quick question for you. Do you think there might’ve been a possibility that he put an aftermarket firmware on your machines and was kind of like stealing the overhead of hash, the extra hash that they were producing and maybe that’s why he was so resistant to kind of ship them back or he kept encouraging them, like, let’s keep mining together. Let’s keep it happening.
Just out of curious, you know, like did that ever cross your mind? It didn’t, it didn’t with him cause after my month ended they, they weren’t hashing anymore. So it’s possible he could have just been using my ASX to mine during that period, which maybe when they came back they all had the pool information in there. So that would have been a little bit of work. I do think there are probably some people or providers in Canada that might have done stuff like that. Okay.
That’s an interesting concept. Yeah. Cause cause Ethan and I just talked about that recently on our last episode with, with JP where people install a aftermarket firmware and it can increase the hash rate, you know, maybe increase the wattage consumed as well, but sometimes they can tune them and get a little bit more out of them. And, and so yeah, if it’s if they’re doing something like that. Yeah. It actually is possible to take a little bit of that hash rate for themselves. Shares. Yeah.
Hmm.
Running a decent size farm, you know, let’s say a couple of thousand machines that could really add up to some serious, you know, free hash basically.
Right.
Absolutely. Okay. So, so yeah. You said you eventually did get them back. How, how did that,
Yeah, how did you get them back? I I basically had to send a threatening email saying I was gonna have to find a lawyer and pursue legal action because there’s no reason this, this was like three months or something. This has gone on. And he shipped them out the next week. I mean, that was the end of it. Yeah. So
That worked out. That was enough for him.
Yeah. That I just don’t get it. And he posted something on Reddit. Oh, he tried to stay in, you know, he posted something like three or four months ago. Yeah. Right. It’s not a great source of any, anything crypto related as far as I could, but it just popped up on my feed. And it was somebody in like R slash Bitcoin mining saying they were trying to come up with a catalog of colocation facilities and things like that. And he popped in and it was like, Oh, I offer co-location services at a Washington. And I popped in. I was like, don’t, I was trying to be nice. And I was like, I, I would highly caution against the service provider. Here’s a brief summary of what happened. And he responded back and just said, I was extremely, extremely problematic client and stuff and I wish I could just say, yeah, I am. Yeah. And then he offered to take me back in as another client. I know this guy’s classic,
You know, out of one side of his mouth, he’s cursing the other side of the mouth. He’s like, Hey, you want to do business?
I mean, Jesus.
So yeah. Tell us, tell us about your, your next experience. I mean, obviously that was not a positive experience, you know, tell us about, yeah.
Or so. So once you had those miners back, I mean, what, what was the economy like at that point? As far as Bitcoin, the difficulty, the, so those were like S nines you said?
[Inaudible] I think I had, I had two dethrones which ham with him, which I just told him to keep. Yeah, those became worthless quick. Yeah. I know that. And that whole story was, I didn’t buy them when they came out cause I’m, luckily I didn’t, but eventually they became really cheap and the market was doing well and then they were kind of profitable for a while, four or five months. And that’s when I bought two use devices and had good luck with them. But for, in terms of the shipping costs, it wasn’t even worth out. Like, now you can do, you have some free paperweights, you know? Right. Yeah. but the market was still fine with the S nines and the T ones at that time. If you could get a lower rate. I think this is kind of when the [inaudible] came out and they would have been in T fifteens I think they were available for pre purchase I think early that January, February, March, April. So I think I got two T fifteens coming out sometime that spring as well. But yeah, so I, I was still buying devices based on the market and, and that’d be a whole other interesting podcast to do is equipment purchase. I’ve made some really awesome decisions and I’ve made some really bad decisions. Where should I have your back again about that? Then go through another history, history of good and bad decisions. That’s a whole other interesting sphere of the, of this space here. Okay.
So what would that first provider were you a smaller client of his or did you kind of feel like maybe all of his clients were about your size?
Yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting question. I don’t think his total capacity was that large. Like I think it was under a megawatt. Okay. I don’t know how many devices he had himself running. I assume, I assume if you own a colocation facility, you also have some of your own devices running there. I think that, yeah, I don’t totally guessing here, but I don’t think it makes sense for anybody just to open up a colocation facility and not run any of their own devices. I think honestly, they’re opening up a facility. You only have so much capital for dropping the facility itself and only purchase, you know, so many as seventeens as nineteens or whatever’s going on now to fill it up. It’s sort of like a way of hedging almost again.
Yeah. You want to maybe try to reach that next threshold where you’re actually using up the power that you paid for in order to get that discount or whatever it is. Yeah. So there’s, there’s multiple reasons why people might want to do hosting services while they’re doing self mining at the same time. Yeah.
Right, right. And that’s, I don’t know if you guys are trying to get into whether being a small client versus a large client matters.
I think it probably does in a lot of places. And it probably does. I don’t know that from the tech support side from the business and I don’t know how much it would matter if you’re talking like my 58, six, if they’re all just, you know, standard shot two 56 minors if they’re just doing reboots on them. And that’s all I pretty much have to do for those devices anyways. I don’t know if it matters if I have 400 or 50, cause it’s going to be the same, roughly the same rate of reboot and texts anyways.
Yeah. So from, from my experience on, on the hosting provider side yeah. And dealing with larger and smaller clients, sometimes what I felt was the smaller clients were the biggest pain in the butts, right. Because they’re, they’re constantly looking at their pool. They’re, they’re looking at, you know, their their app and trying to see how many units are up because every single minor matters to them. So yeah. Hold it. Okay. These, these smaller clients are feel like more of a pain, but it all comes down to the contract. Right? They’re saying that they’re going to have such and such percent uptime and they’re going to maintain your minor. It’s up to the standard or if B central repair, they’ll help you to do that timely basis. So yeah, it, it really shouldn’t matter if you’re big or small.
Okay.
I can completely see what you’re saying though, because the very first facility I went to, that was about an hour and a half out of where I’m at down in Georgia, that the guy’s great, super nice. They told me some stories about doing it. I am not surprised. Like they had a whole deal where somebody organized basically a a group buy, but a group servicing. So one person was supposed to be in charge of these hundred miners and total disaster and I see that from you owns two miners. They’re obsessing over thinking they’re going to be there doing that is checking why? Why is my hash rate down a half a terahash today? Hey Scott, what’s going on? Why’d you know? Do you notice anything weird? Like they might, they’re also not, they don’t understand how much the hash rate varies. And the poolside and the reject rate and things like that. And then that stuff varies. I can totally see.
But when, when you were first talking about this offline to us, you had said, yeah, I mean you really don’t feel like you were very unreasonable or over overly persnickety client, right?
Yeah. Like reasonable expectations. I think so. Like I’m not, yeah, I’m not emailing tech support every other week saying, yeah, I don’t like this pool anymore. You guys change all the full information on all my minor. I’m getting a higher, you know, I’m getting an extra point, 1% reject rate out of this pool. I need to try a different one. I’m not not doing that at all.
So, okay, then we’re, yeah. Ethan you was asking where, where did you go from there?
Well, well before you go into that, I’d first like to give a big shout out to our sponsor of today’s podcast. Novablock, Novablock is relatively new a newer pool in the industry. And they believe that as hash rate is shifting from China to North America, that they want to provide a pool that’s better than the rest out there. And they want to do this by educating their customers and giving transparency. And you guys may have heard in a previous podcast with us you know, a client talking about how much they love Novablock and you know why they think it’s a better pool. So do yourself a favor, give them a shot, give them a try. And Scott’s gonna show you guys how to get a good deal with them.
Yeah. And actually, yeah that person that was talking about, there we go. Novablock right there and immersion systems. Yeah. So they’re, they’re very happy we had them on as a guest. And so it was interesting how that worked out. So if you go to the website and log in or sign up there is an invitation code, so it’s very easy. Just type it in. OFFORD18. And what that does is it will reduce your pool fees down to 1.8% for the lifetime.
And I’d also like to mention that if you have a lot of hash rate, don’t hesitate to reach out to Novablock and tell them, you know, Hey, I have a lot of hash rate I can offer to your pool and try to get a better deal with them. They will work with you.
Yeah. So thank you Novablock for helping us to keep this podcast running. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks Novablock.
Okay, Tony. So tell us about your, your next and
Getting hosting and with your minors. Absolutely. real quick, kind of just to address something Scott brought up. I will say that there have been, I mean, when you get into altcoin mining some of those devices are not very reliable. And on one sense I’m like, he did X, decided and agreed to accept these Myers in your facility. And so if they need a reboot every single week, which gosh, some of them really do. Yep. Same time. Like, I would totally get it if a provider said, Oh yeah, we’ll take all these units from you, but we’re not taking, we’re not taking any of those. Those are problematic. Cause I have at the, at the facility with I’m with right now, which I’m very, very happy with. They charged me a smaller percentage more for Oculus minors. And I will say they do require, even with their auto reboot function, they do require more reboots than more hands on. Yeah.
So it sounds like, like a company like that might have already had experience with these different types of miners so they know, Hey, if we’re going to take them on, it’s going to take a little bit more management so we should charge a little bit more of a premium. Sure. Right. Okay. Right.
And they’re, they’re a pretty large co-location company from what I can tell. So they knew and they probably knew about some other types of miners as well. But you know, if I, again, if, if a minor goes down, I email, Hey, this needs to be booted when you get a chance. It’s kind of a thing. I’m not expecting that to be back up in an hour or two or four or necessarily even that day. So I’m sure there are some small clients as you mentioned that expect that right away, which is obviously not realistic.
Okay. So, so where are we at in the timeline then of your story? What year you know, what’s going on in the market?
This would have been now I think spring ish of 2018. Okay. I had was getting some of the units back from Washington and I had sent a number of new units I purchased out to a facility in New York. Okay.
And how did you hear about this New York facility?
So after the, after the events are going on in Washington, I decided to not necessarily just you know, accept like based on price or something like that. I started doing, try to try to do what research you can. And by that I mean at least email them beforehand, try to get a feel of how they, they’re responding back to you. Are they, are they just giving you a one sentence response to your inquiry? I’m trying to get some sort of like social understanding from the facility. A lot of websites are out of date, their pricings lately out of date. I mean it changes all the time. As you know, as I mentioned, they always say they have a VPN and you can always get remote. Yeah. yeah. So I started doing research that way and just sending out, you know, maybe look into 10 facilities or email these types of facilities and that’s just a general inquiry. I wasn’t, there wasn’t like a 10 back and forth response, I need this, I want to see a video of this, I want to meet your staff. None of that. I just, I know you would you always recommend using your a VPN when you host with someone else with a hosting provider so you can manage things yourself.
Yeah.
On my side of it, I feel like if I do need something that’s kind of picky, like changing a pool or something, it just makes it easier on them. Yeah. That being said, I don’t, I understand the logistics of managing, running and operating a facility on the scales. A lot of these co-location facilities are pretty, pretty crazy. And I’m not up on the software side of the security concerns that they might have from that. Let’s say I do update some firmware with something that’s not great, then now I have a huge problem. I’ve created a big problem for them.
Right. Yeah. So I guess there are pros and cons both ways. Giving you access to those minors, right. Is one thing. Yeah. And so then there’s some providers that have software that, that can act as a, a management panel instead of giving VPN access where, you know, if you want to reboot your minor, you can if you want to change a pool, you can, so it gives them limited access without actually giving that tunnel into their facility. Right. Yeah. So that’s, yeah. Okay.
And I’ve never had any experience with any of those. I’ve never seen it offered. I’m sure. I know, I know they do exist, but yeah, I’ve never seen any of the co-locations offer that as a as a, a service.
I, and the reason I think for that, and I do have experience with this because when I, I, I actually still own like 1.5% of a hosting company little and, and we provided a software like that and the clients just loved it, absolutely loved it. And, and it helped us and it helped a client a lot. But the issue is when, when we actually tried to sell this management software to other farms so that they can offer it as a service, they really were hesitant about just one more fee, one more thing to have to pay for. And, and they were struggling to say, well, should we just absorbed this fee or should we pass it onto the customer and say, Hey, customer, if you want a better access to your minors you’re going to pay $2 a month, or, you know, whatever is per miner. So yeah, there was always that question of is it gonna really be worth it to the mine farm and can we pass that fee off to the client or not?
W was it a question of them not believing that, that it would in the end save them in terms of the it upon their end? Yeah,
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it’s beyond obvious that if you can empower the customers at your facility, it relieves, you know, your burden of labor and management costs and, and puts it on to them. And if they can pay you a little bit extra for that, then that’s even a greater margin of profit.
So I do have to say though this was being attempted at a time where it was barely profitable to be running an S nine in the first place. So you have to think, Oh my goodness, like my miner’s making $2 a month and you want me to pay $2 a month to offer that? Yeah.
So New York, New York. Yeah. So this one was interesting cause it was like a three month deposit, months one, six and 12. And for about six or seven months, they were absolutely fantastic. Didn’t really have any issues. Occasional reboots. Every once in a while they would have you know, a bad storm would come through or something and say we’re going to shut everything down for 24 hours and they would show everything down for 24 hours. No big deal.
Oh wait, how did you hear about this company?
Yeah. go Google searching and emailing, huh? Yeah. Yep. You have to go to about, at least back then I had to go to probably a page two or three to find somebody that actually had their prices were accurate. You know, email don’t respond cause they might not be in business or they’re not be taking on new clients. A lot of time we’re not taking on new clients. Yeah. But the, the thing about their, everything was working out their, their tech support was weird. I just didn’t really have any big problems with them. But you, they had a phone number you could text that you’d say, Hey this, this miner’s down. Right. But thank you. And you could email them directly but they would never let you know if they’ve rebooted it. So the issue there is if you have a problem that’s larger than just a reboot, you don’t know if they’ve actually gone to reboot it.
So if the power supplies bad or you know the control board is bad you would have no indication. So now you’re kind of like troubleshooting on your end as just this giant question Mark. If I’m like, Hey, you have to email somebody and say Hey did you reboot it? Which seems weird to me cause I basically asked them if they did their job right. Cause maybe it comes off critical. At least that’s the way I’m thinking of it. So I’m like, Hey, did you reboot this? Maybe the power supply is bad. I don’t know. And then it would show a line and be like, Oh, so you didn’t reboot it yet or it’s weird troubleshooting issue where they had to reboot it twice cause something larger is going on, you don’t know.
Right. So, so it sounds like some sort of a customer service ticketing software might’ve been helpful there where you could follow up or they could actually reply. Maybe there was just some communication gap between the actual technician in the mine versus, yeah, they, they weren’t communicating back and forth to each other. Perhaps
Le left hand, not talking to the right hand problem. Right. One time I got a text back, I didn’t text them at all or have a reboot. I just got to be rebooted to your Meyers. I’m like, okay, thank you. What a, so yeah, definitely a communication issue and I’m sympathetic. Like I don’t, I understand that a lot of these facilities, they might’ve gotten into something over their head at first. They might they might be understaffed, you know, the prices changed. Obviously we’ve seen a lot of volatility in the past few years. So, I don’t know if they’re operating on a skeleton crews or whatnot. I get pinched, they get pinched. We’re all getting pinched, so I get it. But about six or seven months into this experience they had, they, they partnered with somebody else. And I don’t know, we’ll deal of this arrangement, I don’t even know if this necessarily was, you know, what caused their service to sort of decline. But it did, it noticeably started to decline and now sort of having some weird things. So their, their service went down for two weeks. Oh wow. It went down for two weeks and they said it was somebody had cut their ether net or their backbone rather in the facility. Well, I don’t know if that’s a, a jilted ex-employee who knows? Wow. Yeah. It could be a hundred percent legitimate. Could be completely fake.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, in those situations where your mind is just kind of go offline and they don’t come back within a few hours, you really gotta wonder what’s, what’s going on, what’s happening? If you can’t physically go to that facility and see it with your own eyes. Yeah. They, they could really just kinda spin a story.
And, and there was a, there was a time, maybe a month or two before things started going bad where everything went offline. Emailed them like, you probably have a situation going on. I get it. They’re offline. It’s not just my units. What is going on? Like a day later they emailed back and said, yeah, somebody sent us a couple of hundred overclock units where you, they, we don’t allow overclock units. They hooked them all up and it did something to their power system, you know, and that the outage, well, why didn’t you just,
Couldn’t they just unplug, you know, like some of them and maybe a blue something that’s in a blue something. The transformer, again, not an engine breaker or, yeah, I guess if a whole transformer went out, but that’s why you have breakers. So you don’t overload the transport. I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. Tony, we’re, we’re starting to get to the end of our podcast here and I have one final question for you. What is the worst experience that you’ve had? You know, dealing with a host.
Real quick, I’ll try to sum up the New York one cause that was kind of ridiculous in the first place down for a few weeks up for two weeks, then down for a month and I’m thinking like, like mining wasn’t great at the time, so it is what it is. I’m under contract, whatever. I’ll get all my mining time in. And they came back and expected me to pay for, for those six weeks. They were lucky enough to credit me for two. I was like, what are you talking about? She’s like, you can’t pay for six weeks service contracts that they can’t do that. So I had to softly throw the contract at them. I don’t even know why a company would ask you. Right. Firstly, and that gets into the, what we were talking about earlier, maybe they were shutting down for a month because they were being pinched on their budget and then they just expected people to pay and make a loss. I don’t know,
Maybe, maybe they were hashed into their own pools. Yeah, it’s,
Yeah. Cause that could be a whole number of things that happen. Yeah.
And then yeah, so, so before we go though, I do want to hear about your great experience. I think you said your latest hosting provider and, and you know what, why don’t you just go ahead and name who that is and tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah, sure. So I’m not with the vast majority of my minors, some with two facilities, but the vast majority are with compute North and they’ve been very, very good. They they have a ticketing system, you know, and would have thought things like that and just their communication’s been great. Every time you do, you think from a reboot to a bigger issue, they, so you back and say it’s online. It’s hashing, please confirm with us. It’s great. Their billing has been great. Everything compute North, a Minnesota company,
So that’s a row. And
Yeah, I’ve got a Rose Rose business card right here. Yep. And then I’ve got a, was it Marshall? The president? Oh yeah. Okay. His good thing is
Do it at a pretty reasonable price too. So whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it right.
And, and how, how many miners are you running right now there?
Right there. I have about 30 something. I’d have to pull the spreadsheet to find out, but yeah. They I’ve got about 30 something and I’m planning on sending more to them as soon as get stuff back from other, either facility.
So, yeah. That’s awesome. That’s really great. And, and what, what kind of advice would you give somebody that’s new that’s thinking about getting into this? Maybe, maybe they started like you, you know, they’re hosting in their basement not hosting, but running their own miners in our basement of the garage. Now their wife has getting upset, you know, my house is too hot. I can’t stand this noise, another $2,000 electric bill this month. That’s crazy. So what kind of advice do you have then for people that are looking to offload their babies to another provider?
I would say I wish there was some source where people could review this, but I’m also skeptical of online reviews as well, so I kind of don’t exist. But if, if you’re, if you’re trying, if you’re emailing back and forth, maybe with somebody who’s a smaller provider, I would say kind of go with your gut instinct. If they seem a little bit odd and they’re emailing, if they’re there, the way they’re addressing issues or talking to you over email seems a bit weird, either quieter sense. Either they don’t have time for you all, which fine, then you don’t want to be with them. If they don’t, they’re willing to deal with a small client, but they don’t want to really want to then, then don’t go with them. Or they might be somebody who’s interested in trying to get you to pay for a month of service that wasn’t provided or not send your miners back and want you to send them out was a big point to send seven, eight miners back. Yeah. Kind of go with your gut on that.
And it sounds like really having that contract to fall back on is a very good idea because I’ve seen so many deals out there where you had somebody just sent the miners and they’re kind of going on their word to get them up and running and, but there has been some times where you have had to revisit that contract and say, Hey, this is what the contract says. You know I don’t want to take you to court. Let’s, let’s follow the, yeah. The call of what we agreed to.
Yeah. I would say there’s one thing I’ve never seen in a contract that I wish I would have now cause a statute of how long it takes them to ship your units back or,
Or just a response timeframe. Like they have, you know, three business days to respond
For any where a lot of them actually do say their response time is 24 or 48 hours, but,
But actually taking them off the rack and packing them up and making them available for pickup or to be put in Sherman. Yeah. Yeah, that’d be a good thing for sure.
That’s, that’s a great idea. You know, just a heads up, Tony, I don’t know if you’ve been to our directory listing or not on cryptomining.tools/directory.
I have, so you put that up a week or two ago or not so long ago?
Yeah, we we just launched a couple of weeks ago and we’re really excited to
It’s got to, to show off.
You know, we’re really excited to provide really good quality hosting providers and kind of help people like yourself, people like myself through the, the rhetoric of Google searching and, and emails and who can you trust and who you can’t trust and all those things. So in our listing, yeah, it goes through and it gives you, you know, many different you know, hosting types or, or management options. For the people who don’t know exactly what their power requirements are, you can just simply select the miners that you already have and the quantity and it will calculate what your, your power demand will be. And then when you go next, you can filter through, you know, based on region or based on, you know, what price is, is affordable for your budget. Now we do plan in the future to kind of create a rating system. And if a listing is below a certain rating or something like that, then they’ll be automatically booted off of our, off of our listing. But yeah, we’re really hoping that this will will change things will be a game changer and make it easier for the community to find proper hosting. Yeah.
Well, Tony if somebody wanted to contact you and maybe like on telegram or whatnot how could they find you?
Yeah, probably Telegram. The best way to contact me. And I, I say that Justin, I don’t, if a lot of people do email me about stuff, I don’t necessarily want my email box flooded respond within 24 to 48 hours.
Yeah, I think I shared my telegram with you guys. Post it right here. @Sunniest_ Solomin. Sorry. Is Solomon. I like that. That’s awesome.
All right, well Tony, it was great to have you on. I love your perspective and your story. I know we didn’t hear it all. You’ve had a lot more horrible experiences than good, but I, I’m glad to hear that you finally are having some good experiences in this field.
Yeah. And I just want to put it out there. If you are hosting directory and you guys want to be listed in our directory listing, please reach out to Scott or myself. So we can get you guys registered on the site and, and connected with potential hosting clients. Yep. All right, Tony. Alright, thanks. Thank you for your time. All right, bye.