Pop Adrian joins us on today’s episode of Crypto Mining Tools. He started from humble beginnings in 2013 when he was just an everyday miner with 1 GPU rig. Today, Adrian is maintaining BlockChain Host, the largest Bitcoin mining facility in Eastern Europe. He operates the 63MW/h facility that is located in Romania. Adrian is also working on a video tutorial blog about Bitcoin and is educating many people about his journey.

https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BRJjQQoyQdGw https://www.facebook.com/groups/crypto.mining.tools/permalink/564882231092416/ https://www.facebook.com/cryptominingtoolspodcast/videos/323094931997393/ https://www.facebook.com/scott.offord.milwaukee.seo/videos/10163400000695024/

Transcription

And we’re live, welcome everybody to the crypto mining tools podcast. Today here, I’m your host, Scott offered, and we have our cohost.

Hi everybody. And then down here we’ve done pop

Pop. Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us today. Pop. we’re really interested to hear what you have going on there in the blockchain space. You know, we just really have a, a very casual conversation and we’d like to interview people that are just doing the actual work, you know, people who are involved in industry and have their hands in it and just do the everyday work. So we’re really happy to have you here today. So we have w why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, how you got into this and, and what you’re up to now.

Okay. So my name is Adrian Pope. I’m from Europe from Romania. I’m dealing with Bitcoin from 2013 and I’m a minor since they won, after I find out about Bitcoin in in a month or so, I bought my first GPO and I started mining light coin at that moment because the Asics were already in the Bitcoin network

And, and it was very profitable back then to the line light coin. Yeah.

Yeah. It was Mike mining light coins with the GPS.

How many light coin where you mining a day with, with your,

I had the, let me explain a little bit. I put my car, my car for sale for around the,

Wow. You were committed. That’s commitment.

I sold my car and with my car I bought my first two mining Greeks each with a five GPU. I started mining after two months with two full mining rigs and the Y was making around the six, seven, like points per day.

Wow. Okay.

For what and what year was that?

Yeah, 2013.

So 2013. For those who don’t know, a light coin peaked out at around $400. I think $420 is what it’s all time high was. And so if, if you, you know, factor that in, you know, you were making, you know, quite a bit of money per day, that’s the day. So I would imagine in, in maybe just two or three weeks you could buy a new car.

After some years I bought me a new card.

Yeah. So back then though, w was it fairly easy to cash out, you know, from light coin into, into Fiat

Or in in that year I remember the exchange, BTC slash E. Dot com was online. And we saw there the light points and they cash out the paper, but the commission was pretty high, but it was pretty easy. So if you wanted to sell, you could sell them. There was no issue.

Yeah. So, and then, and then from light coin what did you get into after that?

From light coin I bought from beat main, my first and minor S one.

Yeah. What was that like a half a tear hash or something?

Yeah, yeah, they were like 200 gigahertz per second. Wow. Okay. So I bought with them, with the money that I made, I bought like seven or eight and I started, I mind back then around 0.3 0.2 Bitcoin per day. Wow. Pretty much after this I started to buy the next ASIC miners, the [inaudible], those were the best miners. I became a pretty respected member on Bitcoin talk fro for my country. And a lot of my friends started asking me, Hey, don’t you have any location food? Put out our miners or something like this. And the, for the beginning guy just take out like Keurig from my friends and put them in my location. And after this, a lot of my friends joined me and I had to extend the, my pleasure in for business.

So tell us about your first location and how did you find it? How did you negotiate power? How did you build out that infrastructure? Because this was way back in the day. Like, now we have, you know, kind of enterprise level solutions to help do these, you know, big farm build outs. But you were one of the first. So tell us about those struggles. How did, how did you find those solutions?

In my country, in my country, it’s the industry, it’s pretty low, so it’s very hard to find the big powering started somewhere. And if you want to do this from scratch, it’s very, very expensive. So after like six months of searching and discussing with others, I found a location pretty close to me around 20 kilometers from my house where it was an old factory. And there I rented the 1000 square meter area and they had the install it like a 600 kilos per hour power. And a first time when I stepped in, I had some clients around 100 kilowatt per hour about compassion, but it was okay. But as we made some ads on Facebook and on Google, the clients just went from 100 to 1000. Yeah.

Local, local people. And you said Romania?

Yeah, I had a like 50% from my customer were from Romania and 50% were from Europe. I had from France, from a UK, from Belgium, from Poland, Hungary, all the countries from Europe.

Would it be safe to say that you had the first megawatt mining facility in Romania?

Would that be? I was the first public, but in I found out later that in my country where some private Bitcoin mining facilities, but they were just of one person. So very private self mining, self mining publicly I was the first megabytes.

Yeah. I think their thing is they wanted to keep everything for themselves where you were sharing like, you know, Hey, look at all this light coin made. I can buy a new car, I can do this. Like, so, and then everybody jumped on you and said, you know, we need your help. And you’re like, okay, here I’ll plug them in at my place.

So, so back then, okay. You had a few hundred a kilowatt and then maybe a few thousand. What, what were you paying as far as the kilowatt hour? Right.

Yeah. What was your electrical cost?

My electrical costs when I started the binding was around $0.07 cents. The pricing Romania for electricity went on up every year when I started to have one makeup art, I get some discounts from our power company, but next year they put the price higher. So it was pretty challenging. The first megawatt was a really easy to plug in because I combined my person and I don’t have any electrical skills, so I finished the school that doesn’t have any issue related with electrical or something like this. And the first megawatt was easy because the power was installed it already, but yeah, I had to take it from the scratch and it was pretty hard, but I made it.

So did you have to work with the city, with the, the government at all? Any of the government infrastructure? Yeah.

Yeah. I had to work with the local authorities very close because you file a paper for example, and you will get the response in 30 days. And I had clients calling me Adriana, we are shipping one track of minors. There may have been two weeks we will make. So it was a pretty hard but with a lot of work and the 24, seven work I managed to put live the second megabyte. Yeah.

Now were, were you charging any kind of hosting fees or anything like that to help all these people out?

$10 for a maintainer, three for each device in these $10, it was included. The guards, we had the guards in three shifts, 24, seven. We had the seven months on site during day two, during the night, 24, seven. So our downtime was very limited. For example, the people who were mining with the GPU cards, they received like a notification if the minor went off for 50 minutes. But our system that was made by me after one minute, we already know the issue and the client haven’t even seen that the minor was down because we fixed very quickly a plus for us.

Yeah. So, so are you saying that you charged basically you made them pay for the electricity costs and then $10 a month per miner?

Exactly.

Wow. So, so you weren’t necessarily marking up that kilowatt hour rate, you were just charging a flat maintenance fee?

Exactly. For example if the electrical company was selling me the power with zero point $10 cent, I was selling with zero point dollar $10 cent. It, I didn’t put any extra there. I had the $10, that $10 was the money for our team for rent and everything. Yep. And you know, tell us what, what happened next? What was the next step? Yeah. Okay. So after we made the second megawatt it calmed the third megawatt because the miners were already in a boxes there, but the electrical installation wasn’t done. I hired some people to work weaker. And the faster after we set up the third mega bot,

We started the working on the fourth mega bot because it was around the, well, it seems like you just couldn’t stop, but you know, you get one megawatt and then two, and then you’ve got to get three and four. Yeah. I wanted to stop because my dream, my passion became, become a business. And I saw that it’s very much very much for me. So I wanted to stop, but my customers, they stop calling me. Adrian, we shipped another miners. We see, we see, okay. We bought from China [inaudible] so they just kept piling them on things.

[Inaudible] Mining farm from Romania or a smaller one, closed the owner from that mining company director of the customer to me. So, Oh wow. It was a lot of work. So and then now I can’t remember. What’s the name of your worksite blockchain posting. Watching. Hosting. Okay. But T O T C SEO, SEO, SEO. All right. So obviously now you’re, you’re still offering that service. Exactly. I want to discuss before I want to say a few things from Ali, other location. And 2018, when people on price went down, a lot of customers started stopping their miners. A lot of customers started to sell their minors and a lot of customers didn’t pay the electricity bills. And we still have the miners here. So it was a pretty nasty situation. Yeah. But we closed that facility in 2019 in January or February, we closed it.

We don’t want to make more depths because we had to stop. But at the end we were like 50 kilowatts per hour from four megabucks that devices were on site, but the customer asks to stop them. So after we stopped before these like, I don’t know, half a year before another customer came to me and wanted to invest and make a new facility. And that the moment I am managing these new facility that I send pictures to you, these facilities, six, three, three megabytes per hour, it’s operational at the moment. We are getting minors incoming minors, new minors. At the moment the power station is working, but we don’t have, we have our own minors, but they are a ready, not profitable. So they are stopped.

Yeah. Okay. Well maybe we could change that. You know, we can, we can all hope that Bitcoin will go past 10 K again here today.

It needs to go past 16, eight, $16,800 is the magical number for us nines to stay profitable after the happening.

Now why, why do you say that? Me? Yeah.

Oh, okay. I just ran the calculations with my, my spreadsheet and that was the number where you could make like a dollar a month. Okay. I’m going to ask tonight. So

That’s at a, at a specific difficulty and a specific price or efficiency of a minor.

Well, it has to do with your power usage and for the amount you might not, obviously if difficulty goes up that’s going to affect it. But you know, the, the, you know, roundabout breakeven point 16 eight anything below that, you know, if the, if the difficulty is higher than obviously you’re not going to be profitable even if it’s at a higher number. But yeah, that segues me into our sponsor BraiinsOS. And I’m glad that that you kind of brought this into it, Scott, because you know, if you are not using the most efficient settings on your miner, you are not going to get the most out of your miner. And as we know, most of these miners, they have a factory firmware and the factory firmware has very limited settings, very limited adjustments that you can do to your miners. But BraiinsOS is a firmware that allows you to unlock your, it allows you to free up and really harness the power that the miner can, can do in terms of performance. There are two flavors. There’s the open source flavor and then there’s the enterprise version. The Enterprise version has even finer grain control over what you can do with your miner. Do yourself a favor guys. You know, we’ve, we’ve got these little devices here and back in the day we had a jail break them and unlock them to get them to do all the wonderful things that we want them to do. Your miners are the same, you know, put in a firmware that will optimize your miner’s performance. If you’re not, you’re just losing money, you’re throwing away money. And so Scott’s going to tell you guys a little bit more.

Yeah. So thanks again to BraiinsOS for sponsoring our podcast and helping us to get the word out about blockchain and cryptocurrency and mining. So yeah one cool thing about this year is with their enterprise version if you mind to their Slushpool, then you’re actually going to get 50% lower fees for mining. Okay. So yeah, there, there is that 2% dev fee for the commercial edition here, the BraiinsOS+, but they try to offset that a little bit with a lower pool fee. So yeah, definitely like we were talking about with the efficiency and, and the having it coming up. It’s definitely a good idea to try to do something like this where you can maybe try to get a little bit more efficiency out of your, your miners. Right. so with BraiinsOS+ you can actually tweak them and make them a little bit to use a little bit less Watts per terahash and get a little bit more life out of them after the happening. Right.

I’d also like to just bring up this too is, is that a lot of your original firmware is using a lot of really old outdated code. I mean code that has been around since the very beginning. And one of the things I like most about BraiinsOS is they’ve made, you know, the stratum version two protocol they’ve made. You know, they’ve taken in all the years of wisdom and, and all of the mistakes that were made in the past and they’ve made that into a new 2.0 version, which I think will become the new standard. And they do this using a language called rust. And it’s just a much more robust language than what was originally everything was done in and so, you know, be a part of the future. This is the future. This is where things are going. And when we talk about things like immersion systems and we, we talk about you know, just dynamic power, you know, there’s some people that, that have different power rates during the day depending on their, at their hours of operation, you know, these of advances and being able to tune your entire farm or just the miners that you’re hosting with to the situation.

This is where the future is folks. And you know, if you’re not doing it, you’re not, you’re not doing it right.

Yeah. Yeah. So definitely check that out. You know, I’m a real big fan of their, their BOS minor alternative to CG minor, which actually they, they were, are hoping that, you know, manufacturers will actually implement that into their mining machines instead of using CG miner just because it’s, it’s you know, another open source alternative. But we’ll, we’ll see. You know, it sounds like manufacturers really are these days getting more close source so that they can control and, and really be in charge of the destiny of, of their mining equipment. But you know, it seems like the customers, the actual buyers want more features. They want it unlocked. You know, they, they don’t want to be locked into an ecosystem that that’s on their iPhone, for example. They, so yeah. BraiinsOS is offering that.

What do you think, POB? Yeah. You know, you’ve been mining for a very long time and you’ve, you’ve seen it become more and more closed source, right?

Exactly. Yeah. I use the BraiinsOS, I use it like after they launched this iOS sorry I use like a few minors, but after that, as the electricity bill went up, we had to stop the minor. Even, even with these three from the us we didn’t make profits, so we had to stop all the miners.

Yeah. What so speaking about firmware, what other aftermarket or third party firmware have you tried?

I tried the ATSIC seal. It’s a us company too. And we, we use a simple mining. We use I worked only with this and I tested like minor stopped. There are a lot of mining software. Yeah, it’s, it’s easy now because back in the, when I started mining, you had only windows and a lot of crashes and yeah, I was installing windows late in the, in the night on the old hardware. Took me an hour to install a windows after restart all the windows on that Celeron CPU, you have the blue screen. That was the perfect night. I know how to work only you. So after that I moved my mining rigs only, you know, but the drivers were pretty shitty on winos only looks so back to windows because on all the new minors for the new coins were launching on windows. So we had to move back to windows to start mining the new points. Yeah. I mind Dodge point for example, after they leave is the blockchain. So very nice. It was the first going that for raising that amount of points per month.

Where do you see things going from, from now into the future of mining? You know you’ve, you’ve learned a lot from your, your past experiences and you’ve worked with a lot of different hardware configurations and even software configurations. Where do you see the, the next steps happening in the next six months to a year?

[Inaudible]

The situation. It’s a pretty complicated from my point of view because for example, I will talk only about the six at the moment as the power from a beat main for example, from Bitmain main miners, they already launching a 100. There are harsh minors, but if you plug them in at the moment after having, you were making like a very little profit back in the like two, three years ago people were buying these miners and they will make the rate of investment in three or four or five months. Now we are talking one year.

Yeah, ROI is getting further and further out with more and more speculation.

Exactly, exactly. So it’s pretty, it’s pretty hard to say, but at the moment, as a, as a minor, I love these, a part of a blockchain and Bitcoin, the mining stuff. But it’s pretty hard to say something, but the things are these prices and these are these difficulty. It’s a very, very bad.

All right, so do you see maybe a huge correction coming in the future? Maybe a lot of people that were mining will, we’ll have to stop mining.

Not quite, but I see the difficulty when the miners are keep investing, buying equipment and waiting for the price to come and follow the example. It’s really hard the moment to buy a [inaudible] from a beat and to plug it in under your bed. You cannot do that

Unless, you know, me, me and Scott,

I slept with the miners in the room like six months. So I know.

How could you sleep with all that noise? That’s the warm you’d be be sweating and like yet earplugs in and like, alright. You know, pop, I have one last question to ask you. What advice do you have to give to anybody that’s getting into mining now? Like let’s say I have a friend who’s never mind before and they want to start mining, what advice would you give them to to start mining now?

My first is advice is like this read about Bitcoin to start understanding the technology and the, to see what these Bitcoin about and read about the Bitcoin difficulty because I had a lot of customers that they called me. Okay, I want in this Bitcoin business, but okay man, wait a second. There is a difficulty. You don’t make that money each month. It can go up, it can go down. It depends on the market. No, I want this. And after they put in like a 10 K after two months. Okay, but you didn’t told me that the two months I will make a less sweet a 10%. So my first advice is to start read about Bitcoin, about a Bitcoin difficulty. I even made the, or the quite big serious about video tutorials about Bitcoin in Romanian language. And I learned a lot of people.

And the before to invest. I recommend learning. I don’t know, I one week in one week you can learn a lot about Bitcoin because the people when they heard about Bitcoin, they okay quick money, but it’s not like big money. So technology people who started the mining Bitcoin or getting into crypto add the patients made money, but who came in with a lot of money and buy some few equipments. They lost a lot of money because you have to stay. And the two, see, I don’t know, a lot of people sold Bitcoin at $100. So that’s another example,

Right? Yeah. you definitely have to patient, you can’t have FOMO and you can’t be greedy.

[Inaudible] Can be greedy. Yeah. Because the people think about beef corn as a money overnight, but it’s not money over my plan. I have to, it’s true that you plug in the device and you leave it there, but there are risks that you have to take them when you buy the equipment.

Yeah. So a pop, where can people find you online?

Well people can find me online on a kilogram with my user tutorial, a video. You can find me on my YouTube channel with the same name. You can find me on Facebook with my name Popa Adrianne or on blockchain hosting.com.

Okay. And then are you on Twitter as well?

I’m on Twitter as well with blockchain. Underline cost. Okay.

I just want to put this out there folks. Don’t send your minors to pop anymore. He’s, he’s had enough of that. He’s got his own gig now and he doesn’t need any more minors from everybody.

Okay. I like, I like, and I love what I’m doing, so it’s fashion that became a business so,

Well that’s, that’s the best. Yeah.

Wow.

They say if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. Yep,

Exactly. So, okay. Quitter. You said blockchain underscore host. Okay. So like this exactly. All right. Excellent. Okay, Adrian thanks for your time today. I’m glad we can get to know you a little bit and understand about mining in Romania and we hope to see you around.

Yeah. Fascinating stuff.

Send you some videos with the minors working.

Yes, absolutely. Send it’s videos and we’ll share that around.

Okay, sure. Bye. Bye. Take care. Bye.