The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Wilson Mining, The Evolution of Bitcoin Mining

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Steven & Eric Wilson (https://x.com/WilsonMining) from Wilson Mining (https://wilsonmining.io/) joins the CBP this week. Wilson Mining, the Iowa based company, provides hosting and consulting services for those who want to get into bitcoin mining. All industries evolve and bitcoin mining is no exception. How will this industry look in a few years from now? From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. #Bitcoin #BitcoinMining #BitcoinScaling Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠ Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX ⁠ A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Mighty CBP. I'm Len, the legend. I'll be doing this one solo today. Joey's got the night off, and I will be talking to, in just a little bit, Eric and Steven Wilson, the Wilson mining crew. night off and i will be talking to in just a little bit eric and steven wilson the wilson

mining crew and uh dive deep into bitcoin mining and a few other topics but before we do that it's a couple of things i have to check off my list of things to do which are a couple sponsors so the sponsor number one we have easy dns you have a website already up and going what are you thinking of doing on that website talk to these guys so if you want to migrate your website over you can they have that ability to do so if you want to create a website you can go to them and create a website get a domain name set up through them or move your domain name to them and there's a lot of different options you can renew your domain over there email hosting so for example if you do have a nice email but you want to move it over to a nice secure and private company that can do it much better for you easy dns has you

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Check them out. Open up an account if you haven't already done so with our promo code. 21 bucks will be added to your account once you do that. So that being said, let's bring on Eric and Steven Wilson from Wilson Mining. Gentlemen, how are you? I am tremendous. How about yourself? All right, man. As I was saying, I was living the dream, but sometimes it's a nightmare,

especially today at the Fiat Mines. It's been a challenging day. Stephen, are you there? I know you're having some mic issues. Yes, I am here. I can't get the camera to work, so you guys are going to have to look at Eric today today so no problem at all no problem i'm just curious i want to get a little bit of background from you gents about your bitcoin journey how it is you guys discovered bitcoin and how it is you guys set up this mining company so i got into bitcoin my my neighbor introduced me to it in 2018. He said he was buying this digital cryptocurrency, which I had no idea what it was at the time. I had done no research on it.

And so he just said, you should look it up. You should start buying. And I didn't look it up. I just started buying. So I was buying all through 2018. And then I started, you know, as IQ went more and more of it, then I started to do research and thought, you know, I have some money in this. I probably got to figure out what I'm actually putting my money in. And so I did more and more research.

And then obviously, you know, I liked what I saw and I just kept buying more and more. And so I was buying from 2018 to, you know, until we started the business. And then I got Steven into it. He's much better at telling the story about this than I am. Yeah. So basically, you know, I had like a break in my life. Like I was running a separate business at the time and it was going well. So there just wasn't like a lot for me to do.

And so anyways, a lot of the smart people that I know were starting to get interested in Bitcoin. And, you know, I was pretty skeptical at the beginning, but, you know, I was smart enough to realize that like, look, you know, either all these guys are wrong, you know, and, or, you know, I'm wrong. And either way I need to figure out, you know, what is going on here. So I took, you know, a month and went down the rabbit hole and came out the other side and was like, I have to have a business in the Bitcoin space. I just have to, like, I'm, I've always been very entrepreneurial. And so, um, anyways, I, I come out the other side, I make up my mind start the bitcoin business and so you know you naturally start throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and nothing really sticked until i landed on mining and mining really stuck because you kind of needed like three things to

get yourself off the ground with mining you needed cheap energy uh you needed a place to put the machines uh they're extremely loud and you needed somebody to be able to fix the machines. And so our families owned a farmland in Iowa for a very long time. We're technically fifth generation farmers. And so there's wind turbines everywhere around us. And so, you know, we were like, okay, there has to be cheap energy somewhere around. Like there's these turbines everywhere. If we go down there and start, you know, knocking on doors, I bet we can find some. And then, you know, there's, you know, we can stick one of these containers in the middle

of one of our cornfields. Uh, there's not a neighbor for miles and miles and miles. We won't bother anybody. Okay. That makes sense. Um, and then the last thing was like, who's going to fix the machines. And, um, Eric, Eric skipped over this, but he was a car mechanic for seven years. Um, and you know, just growing up with him,

I've never seen him, you know, come across a machine that he couldn't figure out and fix. And so that was kind of the bet was like, I bet Eric could figure out how to fix these machines. Um, and so anyways, you know, based off that, basically that limited, you know was kind of the bet was like, I bet Eric could figure out how to fix these machines. And so anyways, you know, based off that, basically that limited, you know, kind of simple mindset to the whole thing. I called Eric and was like, hey, I think we should start a Bitcoin mining company. And I'm 15 seconds into the pitch, maybe. And he's like, I'm in. Let's, you know, let's go. Let's saddle up. And so anyways, you know, we took off and bought a machine and bought one machine at the top and like late 2021 and stuck it in our mom's basement and just like figured out, you know, OK, how do we turn it on and how do we connect to a pool?

And, you know, like just figuring out like the basics. And then, you know, you start getting the, you know, your payouts and, you know, like just figuring out like the basics. And then, you know, you start getting the, you know, your payouts and, you know, things kind of spiral from there. And we took off down to Iowa after that. And yeah, that's kind of like the origin story for us. There was a lot of mistakes along the way too, obviously, before we kind of started figuring this whole thing out, obviously. So you're nearly three years into this bitcoin mining business now i'm curious then what could you tell your younger self say you could meet your 2021 self and you could say just one thing to him and to potentially to divert yourself from any problems what would you tell him

you know i you know i've thought about this before i don't think this is kind of i think it's kind of unique man i said i wouldn't tell myself anything i would let myself go through all the problems all the struggles because i'm you know i'm personally very happy with where we are now you know we've we've gone through a lot of problems we really haven't you know nothing's been tremendously bad or we haven't been able to recover from um and you know that just all the mistakes you made helped us to get where we from um and you know that just all the mistakes you made helped us to get where we are now and you know i think we're doing pretty well so i i wouldn't say anything i would just let you know sit from sit from the sideline and watch

myself struggle that's fair steven would you agree uh yeah i would um i would just say you know give yourself uh plenty margin of error you know, and like things are just going to go wrong. Like, and, you know, there's so many components that go in to kind of making the whole mining business work. And, you know, give yourself a big margin of error because you're not going to get it perfect. Like there's just so much goes that that's going into it. And there's so many different, like, you know, areas of expertise that you kind of have to have your head wrapped around, which is like, you know, the economic side, you have to, you know, the electricity side, the airflow side, the, the repair side,

like there's tons of things that all go into it that you could realistically specialize in all in any one of those um but with mining you you know you have to have your your head wrapped around all of them and give yourself some you know some leeway to make mistakes and not uh you know put yourself out of business uh the first mistake now is there any chance there's going to be a sequel to field of dreams and this is going to be a sequel to feel the dreams? And this is going to be about Bitcoin mining because you guys are based in Iowa,

right? This is, yeah, I suppose. Yeah. We could just walk out. I walk out of the corn. Set up a couple of,

uh, yeah, that'd be awesome. I do a few dreams too. It's about Bitcoin mining. So you guys do a few different things, products. You sell products. I assume you guys do a few different things, products.

You sell products. I assume you guys sell ASICs. Is that what, what are the things you guys sell? Hosting services and consulting. That's the three things I see from your website. So let's just talk about the products. I'm curious to see to what it is you typically sell.

What type of equipment is it? Bitmain? Is it somebody else? I want to hear a little bit more about this. It's mainly what's miners now. We used to not sell miners at all because we took the approach, you know, let's focus on the hosting side. We'll let the minor resellers resell the miners. But then we did the math and the minor resellers were making an absolute tremendous amount of margin.

And one, that's not good for our business because people don't want to come in and buy miners if they're too expensive. And two, it pissed us off a little bit because we, again, we realized they made more money on one sale than we would make on the hosting all year. And so we were like, yo, that's kind of, you know, we don't, that's kind of fucked up.

So we started selling the What's Miners. Well, we started, I mean mean we've only kind of sold what's miners i think there's been a maybe one or two well we've sold used bitmain products but that's just from current customers that want to upgrade to like with the what's miners and whatnot um what else i mean we tried we've tried selling like uh for at the beginning we were we tried selling like immersion tanks um and, yeah. That's right. That kind of became not really worth it. We were selling these shroud type things that you would attach onto the back of the miners to help with airflow.

Eric was 3D printing these. We just built that because uh you know in the middle of the summer like we were just battling the heat so much and so we were trying to you know get clever and come up with any kind of you know solution that we could to just help the miners get through the 90 plus day uh days that we have and we don't have too many of them in iowa but they do happen and you know it gets tough when you're running uh you know three uh three thousand watts through a machine uh in 90 degree heat to keep it cool so uh you have to get clever so um yeah we've tried selling a handful of different things so immersion tanks i i if i recall correctly

steven you are an opponent of immersion and Eric, you are a proponent. Or did I get that wrong? Well, when we first started out, yeah, all the products that we tried to sell is basically stuff that we were using ourselves. And we've already built it and say, all right, you know, why don't we just sell it and see what happens? So when we first started, we thought immersion was definitely the way to go. And so we had our first setup was in our mom's shed in iowa it was it was like a hundred kilowatt immersion setup we we got the the tank from stanford martin systems we got well we first bought a system from dcx which did not work well and it leaked and i had to fix it a lot

and that only held like six miners. And then we got a 20 miner tank from Stan. I built the cooling system, the cooling loop. We were using well water to cool the miners, which worked out really well. And, but it was quite expensive. And so we realized, you know, we get, immersion's great when it's hot out, but it's not very hot in Iowa for that. You know, it's hot for like May, June, July, August. And then it's, you know, pretty temperate, pretty cool. And so we don't get the real benefit of immersion for, you know, eight months out of the year just for four. And so we were like, well, we're spending X amount of dollars building this

immersion system, especially, you know, the bigger we get, the more, you know, we have to buy bigger pumps, bigger tanks, bigger containers, more fluid, you know, all that stuff. I mean, especially, you know, the bigger we get, the more, you know, we have to buy bigger pumps, bigger tanks, bigger containers, more fluid, you know, all that stuff. I mean, that costs a lot, and we're not getting the benefit out of it. And so we quickly switched to air cooling thought, you know, our climate just doesn't necessarily call for immersion or liquid cooling. It just doesn't, the extra CapEx just doesn't give us any advantage. And so we both started off with immersion, then we came to the conclusion that again, CapEx is too expensive. We don't get the benefit. We'll stick with air cooling. And so it's just easier, simpler, and cheaper to set up. Is contamination a big issue

with immersion? Um, not necessarily. I mean, you can, some guys run filters through the, uh, the, the fluid and stuff. Uh, we just put a tarp over our tank we just call the good i mean no i mean it doesn't the the oil doesn't really you know it's not two-phase so it doesn't really evaporate it isn't you know it doesn't uh it was never an issue for for our specific setup i suppose i suppose if it's really dusty maybe but not for us and you guys also you do hosting i'll touch upon that lastly but consulting as well so who comes to you for consulting services and what type of consulting services do you offer i even take that one steven yeah um typically people like who are

looking to set up their own their own farms uh their own operations um and you know are looking to set up their own, their own farms, uh, their own operations, um, and, you know, are looking for a little bit of guidance in terms of, you know, containers that they want to buy, where do you get your transformers from, um, stuff like that. And, you know, we'll kind of point them to the guys that, you know, we've done business with that we, that we like. Um, but yeah, you know, most of the people that are, that are coming to us are primarily, uh, for hosting. I would say that's like, you know, the overwhelming majority of our, of our business and what people, um, are coming to us for is the, uh, the hosting services. And, um, yeah, I guess I can keep, I can jump right into that if you guys want to. Yeah. I want to hear more about this. Yeah. So, um, so we got, we got started

hosting. We, we started self-mining. We really have, uh, we didn't start with the idea that we were going to start hosting. Um, but you know, the economy is a scale with everything and how expensive it all was. We're just two brothers. We're in our late 20s. I'm not rich. So you kind of have to get creative with how you do things. And we had spent a lot of our money on miners. And we wanted to have a nice container. We wanted to go with one of the best container manufacturers, which is Upstream Data.

And the higher up that you go, the better the unit economics you know, container manufacturers, which is upstream data. And, you know, the higher up that you go, the better the unit economics are on the containers. And so if we were going to buy like, you know, a 20 unit one, like the numbers just didn't work as well as if we were going to buy like a 500 kilowatt, which is 144 units. And so the idea was, okay, let's just go and we'll buy the, we started with a 500 kilowatt container and then, you know, we'll put our own miners in there and then we'll sell the remaining slots, um, as hosting, uh, to our, to hosting clients. Um, and so, yeah, that's kind of how we got into the hosting business and have really been leaning very heavily on that ever since so when you buy this container from say upstream data and you have to tell them

specifically you're going to be using what's minor or are they all basically the same type of space like if you put in say a bitmain is it going to be the same type of racks like if you put in say a bit main uh is it going to be the same type of racks that are going to be used so with the v2s we had a v1 um but i'll explain how the v2s work because that's where that's what you'd be buying now they sound like these little metal cutouts that you just like kind of slip into the back so it's the same rack it's just it'll have like the what's minor cutout is you know a little shallower it's the bit mains are quite a bit taller and so you just throw in that little you know that little metal cutout in the back of the rack and then the what's miners go right in there and so i mean you i mean

you give my heads up say hey you know i'm gonna need these i'm gonna need the what's minor cutouts or i'm gonna need half what's miners and then half you know bit main and then they just include you know whatever comedy or however many cutouts you need at no extra cost you just got to let them know but yeah so it's really simple again it takes you know three seconds to throw the metal cutout in there it's pretty it's pretty nice actually do you guys have any experience with those hydro units i know you touched upon immersion but the hydro units are the self-contained it's all everything it's it's built in one but they're huge or humongous in size comparison,

but they hash out quite a lot of, it's a high-tier hash. Yeah, I have never got my hands on one. I'd be really interested to try it, but no, I have never got my hands on one. It'd be really nice because you can fit so much more power density in those things, and so you can have a smaller container, and your CapEx costs will be lower. Well well the container will be lower you know you still have to buy the dry cooler the piping and everything like that but no those things look

really cool i'm kind of interested to try one but it's a humongous though yeah oh yeah i'm sure so you guys must have run the numbers say like i'm looking to buy bitcoin at today's price versus i go to your company and i used your hosting services at what point is it more worth my while to take advantage of bitcoin mining versus just simply buying it from an exchange um here's what i typically tell people and you know so mining is the best way to dollar cost average um basically what you're doing is you're buying electricity every day. You shoot the electricity up to the ASIC. You get Bitcoin out the other side.

You DCA every single day. Right. And, you know, typically, you know, if everything's going well, you're doing it below the spot price. You know, you buy electricity for X amount. You get a certain amount of Bitcoin left after. And then, you know, there's a profit, right? We can all kind of figure that out. The only thing is that I tell people is like, you know, especially when they're just getting in, they're really, really excited about mining is like, you know, there's a lot more risks that go into mining than just spot buying, right?

Like when you spot buy off an exchange, I want to buy $1,000 or $5,000 worth of Bitcoin. I send them the money, they send me the Bitcoin. I know exactly how many Bitcoin or sats I'm going to get for the amount of Bitcoin, for the amount of US dollars, like that trade, right? With mining, that's not true. You know, you have transaction fees, you have network difficulty that go into it, you have uptime and downtime, and there's, you know, the reliability of your hosts, or your ASIC goes down, there's like a lot of more, there's a lot more risks that go into mining, which is why, you know, the miners get to, you know, to profit, so to speak, right. And so typically, what I tell people is like, you know, let's say you had a, you know, you had 20,000, you were looking to, if you're just getting started in Bitcoin, I want, you know, I want to allocate $20,000 into this asset class. So I'll typically

tell people, you know, buy $10,000 worth of Bitcoin right now, get your sats, get them in cold storage, lock them away. You're good to go. Then if you, if, if you want to take more risk, um, you know, then we can buy some ASICs, but let's not buy $20,000 worth of ASICs and risk the whole investment on, on the most risky way to, to get Bitcoin, you know, which is mining. Um, and usually some, some formula like that, depending on like the person's risk profile and stuff like that, uh, makes a lot of sense for people. So that's typically what I tell people. But every situation is unique, of course. And do they have to provide their own ASICs? Or they could purchase it from you, and then you guys would then plug it in on your location and go from there?

Yeah, so we actually require people to purchase their miners through us and we require them to purchase a specific kind of miner. So when we first got started, we were just taking, you know, anybody who would send us their miners. We were taking them and it kind of, you know, it worked out for the start, but we kind of ran into some issues, which was we're getting all different kinds of makes and models of, of miners. And so for somebody like Eric, who's a car mechanic, like all he wants to do is fix the same kind of car day in and day out. I have all the parts for it. I know all the air codes. You see, there's a nice smooth process to it. Um, and then for us, you know, we are, you know, big proponents. We've we've publicly been you know big proponents of what's miners over bitmain products and they have performed i mean we were just noticing that the guys that had what's miners that sent us we would go months without talking to them because their

machines worked the whole time and you know they just ran perfectly and so you know and all the issues that we were having were coming from the Bitmain miners. And so finally it was like, you know, you just see it enough times to like, maybe we should just be doing what's miners and, you know, sure they have a little bit less efficiency and typically you pay a little bit more for them. Um, but you're not having, you know, the $300 hash boards, uh, go down. You're not having the control board go down. You're not having to send it back into warranty work. And all that stuff kind of really adds up. And it just also has, it's like a terrible customer experience when their miners are constantly needing repairs.

And the whole time they just wanted to buy it, get Bitcoin deposited into their wallet every week or every month or whatever it is. And, you know, have it be a passive form of like, you know, Bitcoin dividends or income, so to speak. So anyways, we basically took it into our own hands and said, look, this is the stuff that we know that works in our facilities. The containers that we run, the stuff that we're comfortable fixing. You buy it through us and you buy the models that we like, or you'll have to go somewhere else. And that was kind of the line and the sand that we drew. But it also allows us to stay a small team, which is super important, where the more guys that we have to hire, the higher the hosting rate goes up.

People cost money. And the more people that we have to hire, the higher the rate goes up. And that's kind of obviously the main thing that everybody wants is like, I want to pay the lowest cost for my hosting rate. That's my only, you know, input cost that goes into like running this machine if you're hosting with us. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, that's, i was done with my tangent

so i mean then what are the rates i'm assuming there's going to be electricity costs and some sort of overhead maybe you could give me some statistics on what you guys charge yeah so we had when our second well we got our second container online we were doing a pre-sale for our third container where if you would make a pre-order for what's minor we did a big group buy and so we did a futures order and so what that allowed us to do is what allowed it allowed us to get the m the large moq pricing for you know the one moq guy and so what we did was we had a bunch of guys come in you know i want one two three five ten twenty miners we combined everybody's order into one futures order got really low pricing for everybody which i think our pricing was like five six seven hundred dollars below what

the current market was for one moq and then we gave everybody a 6.9 percent or a 6.9 cent hosting rate for a year and then after that it goes up seven and a half because seven and a half is like the normal rate that we we typically do 6.9 was just, you know, we want guys to pre-order because, again, you know, I want to sell slots before I have them. And, you know, that's just how I would like to operate the business. Again, you know, just like car sales, let me take pre-orders for cars before I build them so I know how many cars I've got to build. So 6.9 cents for the pre-orders. We might do that again. We're not sure.

Right now we just have slots available for 7.5 cents. There's no other fees. Well, sorry, there's a one-month security deposit for the power. It's refundable. So when you mine, you give us a one-month power. We hold on to it just like an apartment. You need a security deposit. You pay your bills.

If you ever stop mining, you pay all your bills. You get that one month back. There's no other fees, repair costs. We don't charge labor for anything. It's just you buy the parts at cost that we buy it for, like fans, control boards, power supply units, stuff like that. We swap everything. We don't charge you for it. You just pay for the parts. Other than that, there's no fees added on. Everything everything's included you know we don't add taxes anything like that so one of the things i think it was two years ago that left a black eye in the hosting field was compass mining and they rugged a few of their

customers and so what i'm trying to get then at is what sort of assurance do you guys or can you provide to your customers or potential customers? And how could you try to lure them in to say, yeah, we are different and better than them? We assume like risk. So like a lot of the things that kind of went wrong in the hosting space was like people wanted to get into mining so badly and you know the hosts were signing people they're locking people into like two three four year contracts that are you know ironclad and you know they are uh they're not really assuming any of the risk that goes that goes into kind of what it takes to mine or whatever and so what we did when we were first starting, um, was we, we said, look,

your contracts for 12 months and then it'll go month to month. Um, but if you don't want it for any reason, you can just give us a 30 day notice. Hey, this isn't working out guys. Uh, please send my miners somewhere else or send them back to me or, uh, you know, please try to sell them for me. Um, and that was kind of a way for us to kind of take some responsibility and risk ourselves where, you know, we invested into this container, that's the risk that we are assuming you invested into this miner, we're both going to do, you know, the best job that we can to us provide a great hosting service for you. And then obviously, you be, you know, a good customer for us.

And, you know, it's, it's just a more like natural way to, to do business correctly. And, you know, Compass really kind of, we, a lot of our customers came from, from Compass and, you know, surprise, surprise. And so, you know, they put a big black eye on the whole industry, you know, and, you know, if you got burned by them or you would heard bad stories about them, you know, there are small guys like us who, you know, to actually take pride in what we're doing and are trying to, you know, actually run a great business and provide a good service for you to actually, you know, make money and not just, you know, burn all your money through Compass. But yeah, we're small. And so a lot of the, you know, really good guys are obviously small. So I said, the other thing is, I mean, the other problem with Compass is they didn't own or operate any of the sites. You know, they just had basically a big hosting agreement with another operator who would

actually run the site. Compass had no say in what happened with that site. You can contact Compass and say, I need help. And Compass can contact the site and the site. I mean, there's too many guys in between the customer and the actual miner hashing. With us, again, we own the site. We don't own any debt on it. We own the container. I'm the one operating it. And so you can contact and talk to the guys who are directly responsible for making your miner hash. With bigger companies like Compass, again, that's just not something you could do because, again, they have a customer service line you call, and those guys have no incentive to get your miner online. They're just

regular hourly employees like most people. And again, when you go to your job and you're an hourly employee, it's not your name on the business. Do you really care what happens at the end of the day? No, you tend to go home and you forget all about it. It's not your responsibility with us. You know, I go home and I'm still running the business. I'm, you know, I'm still thinking about it, still answering emails and, you know, and customer calls and questions and stuff like that. So, I mean, it's, you know, I can't get away from just not having miners hash. There's no, you know, clock out. It's 24-7.

Your last name is on the company name. Exactly, yeah. So, as for your electricity, where do you source it from? Is it primarily coming from those windmills that you touched upon earlier? Or I'm curious, what's the source of your electricity? So the Iowa grid, it's like anywhere from like 40 to 70% wind, depending on,

you know, depending on the day, but we pull straight from the grid. And so, you know, it's, it is the Iowa grid. So it's,

you know, 50, 60% wind. But, you know, other than that, it's, you know,

coal, not gas, you know, the typical stuff like that. Yeah. So any thoughts than that, it's, you know, coal, not gas, you know, the typical stuff like that. Yeah, it's just pulling straight from the grid. So any thoughts on that 30% tax that Biden was proposing some time ago that was going to be added to Bitcoin miners, any sort of crypto miners, I guess we'll call Bitcoin miners, and that 30% will be added on the electricity costs. So what are your thoughts on that? I don't think that's, I don't think't think well i don't think that'll happen and even does you know we're not

we're not mining bitcoin anymore at that point you know we're we're high performance computing it just happened to be running this servers that look just like bitcoin miners but yeah i don't i mean because again we're on the middle of nowhere there There's nobody checking in on us. You know, it's really hard to, you know, pin us down. Cause again, we're, you don't really know we're there. So. You're playing baseball. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're playing baseball or, you know, we're farming. There's hogs out there. It smells like shit. You know, we don't want to come out here.

I want to get into the HPC just a little bit, but before I do, there's a few things I want to just check off my list. You were not talking all that fondly about Bitmain. And I can understand that there have kind of a monopoly on the system itself. So what are your thoughts about competition? And is there any potential competition that could maybe give them a run for their money? But not just that, also have a company that has Western roots, maybe in the United States, that gets involved in Bitcoin mining. I think Blockstream, they're getting... So I want to hear your thoughts about Bitmain, the monopoly they have, and maybe some company like Blockstream interrupting their monopoly. So we've talked with Block a lot, actually, about their proposed miner. And we're really excited about the things that we've talked with block a lot actually about their proposed minor and

we're really excited about the things that we've seen is that mine looks really good the service ability the service ability will be good that i think they they're taking a really important stance on reliability and just having actual customer service and so we're really excited about again their minor um And then the What's Miners do well, but again, they're made in China. But I mean, yeah. Sorry to interrupt. You're talking about Block. So that's the Jack Dorsey company, not Blockstream, the Adam Back company. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah. Block. Yeah. The Jack Dorsey company. Yeah.

Okay. Got it. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. We've seen their... I mean, we have an NDA, so I can't tell you anything, but I mean, we've seen, you know, the, the concepts of their minor and it just looks, they're asking the right questions when it comes to building a good product. And actually, cause a lot of times that we saw with cars is, you know, putting, you know, when you're repairing a car, clearly, you know, reliability was not a thought. It was how do we, how can we make this work for as cheap as possible and have it, you know, live to the end of the warranty. And then after that, it's too bad. So sad. That is not the feeling we get from block. They are making sure that you are able to service their miner right on the rack and just make, I gotta be careful what I say here.

God, I understand. They're trying to make serviceability and reliability really, really here. God, I understand. I know. They're trying to make serviceability and reliability really, really important. And it's really a relief to see that. So I'm going to ask you a question to this and I know there's an NDA, so feel free to say I can't answer that.

Is it, from what you can see, is there going to be strong competition to what's already in existence? Yeah, that's what it seems like. And if you had to guess, and also you have the NDA, when do you think something may be available for sale to the customer? And if you can't answer, that's fine. I asked them that, and they did not say.

All they did was point me to the blog post that they made. That's clear. I'm just as curious as you. I want something. I want something right now. Yeah, I mean, I want something good. If it takes some time to do it, that's cool with me. But yeah, I appreciate you being able to answer what I asked.

I had no idea that they're this far into it. So in terms of, I want to know how much hash rate you guys have. We talked about it before the show, but I just want to make sure everybody's aware, because you guys are pumping out to know how much hash rate you guys have we talked about it before the show but i just want to make sure everybody's aware because you guys are pumping out quite a bit of hash rate so like give yourself a pat on the back and see how much hash rate you guys have eric um yeah so right now we don't have that many miners actually because we've we've sold a lot of our bitmain miners to try to buy more what's. So I think our Wilson mining's personal hash rate is right around 200 to 500 terahash. So I think we have, like, because we have some broker miners that we kind of use for spare parts sometimes.

I think we have, you know, five, six, seven miners doing, like I said, you know, anywhere from 200 to 500 terahash span, depending on the weather outside. But the pool is doing really well. I think I was telling you this before we came in. I think the daily average hash rate we got for the pool is like 1.3x a hash. And we just came out with that pool not that long ago. And so obviously that's been doing tremendously well. And so we're super happy with that.

We've had a few big guys come online. People are clearly interested in the FPPS payouts and, you know, the 0.38% fees. And then obviously, I think a lot of people like the fact because, I mean, we got this idea from co-ops is, you know, if we all combine our hash rate, you know, we can all get lower fees. So the more hash rate our pool has, the lower the fees go. It's because, you know, when we break 2x a hash, you know, we go down to 0.24, we break 5x a hash, we go down to 0.17. We're over 10x a hash, I think we're at like 0.14. So obviously, you know, the fees get lower and lower, you know, just as you know, we have more people combining hash rate. And so it's, you know, again, you know, that's what we try to get, you know, all our customers, all the small guys on and say, yo, just come join this hash rate, come get lower fees.

And, you know, the more, again, the more we all work together, the better, you know, the more stats we all make. And this is Wilson Mining Pool, is that correct? Mm-hmm. Yep. And anybody can join in or they have to be actually being hosted by your company? Anybody can join in. There's no MO moq you can join with your bitax you can join with your 200 megawatt farm it doesn't matter you can join in and you know combine to the hash rate and it's all good lower fees is it kyc free i mean just an email yeah but i mean you could enter in a fake one i don't care it doesn't matter so you're doing your research and from what i understand this is a proxy pool maybe you could talk in a fake one. I don't care. It doesn't matter. So you're doing your own research. And from what I understand, this is a proxy pool.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about what that means. Yeah, sure. So basically, I'll kind of back up a little bit. The reason that we decided to kind of go and try to do this was, you know, there was a lot of good information and kind of on-chain data that came out about a lot of the smaller pools that they were actually just being backed by Bitmain. And, you know, that was something that, you know, when we first got in, we didn't know anything about the pools. And this was kind of right around the same timeframe that Ocean had just come out. And there was, you know, a lot of attention on the pools. And so everyone kind of got like a wake up call as to like what was going on with the whole pool ecosystem.

And basically, it really just kind of like rubbed us the wrong way, you know, because like me and Eric, obviously, you know, it's not a surprise. We're not huge just using Bitmain's template and Bitmain is the one who's backing their FPPS payouts, like I'm not cool sending my hash rate to Bitmain. I don't want to do that, you know. And so it just really sets off the wrong way. are all very secretive and you even have like a bunch of proxy pools which are basically what they're doing is they're going to one of the you know the handful of spps backers which are foundry via btc um antpool um sbi crypto and i think i'm missing one more in there. Who was the last one? It's not F2. Yeah, F2 pool. So those are the only guys that have enough backing to provide FPPS payouts. And what I mean by backing is that in order to not go bankrupt by doing FPPS, you need currently somewhere right now between like fourteen hundred and two thousand Bitcoin, depending on what the fee, how high the fees are.

And so for all these small pools, you kind of you start running the numbers like, do these guys have one hundred million dollars with the Bitcoin on their balance sheet? I doubt it, you know. And so then you start asking. So who is doing who is backing it? Like who who are who is the person that actually is, is, is getting a say, uh, because they're controlling the keys. Right. And, and so it just kind of, the whole thing just rubbed me and Eric the wrong way. And so we decided to go try to strike one of these PPS or these proxy pool deals ourselves. And so, um, the, the best solution that we came up with was like, you know, there, you know,

Bitmain is backing everybody. So let's not go to Bitmain. That's bad for Bitcoin. And they control all the small pools. Let's go to the smallest of the FPPS providers, which is SBI crypto. And so we went to them and they were super, super on board, like right from the get go. They were like, yeah, we're going to, you know, drop you guys down to this fee structure and, you know, go have at it basically. And so that's what we did. And the other thing we were going to do is we're just going to come and say point blank, like this is a proxy pool and we're not going to pretend to be something that we're, that we're not here. And basically what we're doing is the fees that we're getting, we're just literally passing directly on, uh, to, to, to the end user. And we're not making a spread in the middle. So like, if you look at our dashboard, uh, there's nothing fancy on it.

It's very bare bones. You know, if we get some traction with the hash rate, we might, you know, we'll probably add some more features and stuff like that. you know as of right now that's that's the whole kind of background and the story and like kind of how the whole thing works more or less so you're able to leverage the amount of hash rate you have to get a cheaper fee from this mining pool so for example if somebody went directly to them they wouldn't get as favorable a fee payout as you do with uh wilson mining wilson pool mining yeah correct so if you had you know one s9 and you went to sbi you can get 1.5 or you sign up for our pool and you get 0.38 but yeah because again the more hash rate we bring to sbi the lower our rate gets and so again we're just combining everybody's hash rate together to get everybody a lower rate. And we're not making a spread on that rate at all.

Like again, that's what a lot of other proxy pools do is, you know, they get the low rate because they're combining everybody's hash rate, you know, you know, Bitmain pays that, you know, they pay Bitmain, you know, 0.5% and then they turn around and charge you 4%. So again, that's how they're making their money that's now again we're not doing this to make money at all that's why our dashboard is fucking basically nothing is again you know that's just let's just get the lowest fees that we can for everybody and you know let's get more stats and everybody's in everybody's pocket yeah happy oh sorry go ahead the other thing is is um you know like we're not a we're not in the

pool business right like we're a hosting company we mine bitcoin like that's our business so you know the pool thing is just like a you know an extra add-on basically where we don't feel like pressure to you know extract a bunch of value out out you, out of the user, so to speak. Like, you know what I'm saying? Where it's, it's not like, it's not a revenue line for us. Like we already have our clear revenue lines that we have and we're, we're, you know, happy with them. So it's like, that's why you don't need to feel like skeptical about it. And like, you know, what we get out of it is, is, you know, one, you know, if you like the pool, it's an easy way for you to try us. Maybe you want to host a minor with us. Maybe

you want to buy our minor through us. Like that's what we're getting out of the situation. Like, you know, we're not doing it, you know, a hundred percent for free. You know, if you like the pool and you like what you're seeing from us, maybe you will buy a minor. Maybe you will host one, maybe not either one's fine, but like, that is kind of like what we're seeing from us, maybe you will buy a miner. Maybe you will host one. Maybe not. Either one's fine. But that is kind of like what we're getting out of it, so to speak. You're helping out with another FPPS pool. It's not Bitcoin.

Bitmain, sorry. Yeah, we're getting some hash rate away from Bitmain. Yeah. So BoomDust is just throwing this out there. If you guys need some data analysts, you could do that. This is what he does, I think, for his Fiat job. So if you need some help, I'll be happy to provide you his contact information.

In fact, he's the gentleman that helped get this whole thing set up for us between you guys and coming on this show. I think he sent this out on Twitter, and you guys agreed to come on. So without his help, you wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be talking. So yeah, I just wanted to throw that out there. Definitely shoot his info over. Uh, we're all tech and like software is not our expertise whatsoever. So we're always kind of looking for guys to kind of help us in that aspect

because we are quite literally illiterate when it comes to reading. I can't, i literally can't do it so uh that'd be awesome so i want to move on about you touched upon hpc earlier and this seems to be the flavor of the day at least for the past few weeks uh core weave with core scientific and there seems to be a lot of a lot of opportunities out there for people that have power to offer it up not just for mining bitcoin but also for an hpc or the ai field whatever so i want to hear your thoughts about this in terms of is this going to be the new way for bitcoin mining companies to generate revenue and substantial

revenue at that, because they're buying up or they're offering quite a bit of money from what I understand. So I want to hear your thoughts about this. If, if this is the way that the business is going to be moving towards. I have strong opinions about this actually. And I think,

so just to like, I've told this story to a number of people now, but like to put it to perspective, how serious these AI companies are about getting power. Um, we got hit up by HPC, Hewlett Packard. Um, and they were, you know, this was like really, really early. and like when the public miners were starting to play around with the ai hbc stuff and so we got hit up by them and they were like basically got us on a sales call and we're trying to sell us some h100s right and and so we're on the sales call and we're like okay so how much do these things cost like i have no idea i don't know anything about this stuff the guy's like well like typically people buy like 50 million at a time i'm like do you have any you know we're in

the middle of this call like do you have any idea who you're talking to right now like we're i i don't have 50 million i have no way to get access to 50 million like you know and kind of the point i'm making is like you know how on earth did you even find yourself to us like you know two brothers who who do have a lot of access to a lot of power in the middle of nowhere um and that made me kind of realize like just how serious these ai companies are with like we are going to get the power and and and we don't really care you know how much we spend or or what or what basically happens and so i think that a lot of well specifically you know the public miners i think, well, specifically, you know,

the public miners, I think, I mean, they lose money, you know, year over year and month over month. And I, you know, me and Eric have kind of talked about that publicly on Twitter. And so they're just like, not that good at mining Bitcoin, you know, like as guys that do mine Bitcoin, you know, like I, you know, I can read, I can read financial statements. Like I can't actually do that. Unlike I can with software. But like when I read read financial statements. I can actually do that, unlike I can with software. But when I read their financial statements and I look at what they're spending on different areas of their business, I barely can make sense of how they could be spending that much money operating the business compared to what I look at our own business. I think there's a very real possibility. So basically, I think there's

a super real possibility that some of the AI companies are going to come in and write a huge check for the 200 megawatt PPAs that they have for the one gigawatt worth of power infrastructure that they have, and just got the whole thing, build their own infrastructure, the data centers that they need to run their own facilities and just call it a day. Like, I think it's that serious for them. And I think the CoreWeave deal was kind of like a taste of what's coming. But I could seriously look at somebody like a Riot with their huge, you know, one gigawatt facility. And they just say, look, do you want huge you know one gigawatt facility and they just say look do you want you know five billion for this facility 10 billion like what's the number um to get to get access to the power

because the the race the ai race is so uh serious and the money in that space is just so outrageous that it's something that like you know we really can't even compete with um you know in the mining space like we just we're way too small compared to them anything you want to add to this eric in terms of the uh hpc no i mean no not really i mean steven covers it pretty well you know, I just stick to the dirty miners. need a big fat connection to their data center or could they simply just operate off whatever it is is being offered maybe even starlink is that feasible to run these hpc data centers or is that not good enough for them they they care more about fiber optic connections than they do power cost and so yeah no you you do need you know fiber backbones like you like you need 100 gigabit per second for X amount of megawatts.

But no, fiber connections are way more important than anything else to them. But they do need access to power, so it is cheaper. Again, if I don't have power, it doesn't matter where the fiber is, I can't run. So it's cheaper for me to go to the power where it is and then just pay for fiber to come to me. Yes, it might be expensive. But again, I need power. So I do have to go to where it is if I'm not able to get it. Is there any chance this industry is going to overextend themselves for the next little while?

I look at what happened with Bitcoin mining at the time when you guys started up Wilson Mining. And there was a lot of companies out there publicly traded that were taking on debt core scientific being one and then they famously went bankrupt as a result of that but they thought just buying more equipment going into debt was the right thing to do but they over time the equipment value plummeted and it was collateralized against equipment and just it became just a shit show but i'm wondering if the same thing is going to play out this time around where there's this rush to get into this field and a lot of companies are going to buy equipment and try to set them up but maybe they're going to just overextend themselves and this sort of come collapsing down just the same way bitcoin

mining did a few short years ago do you think there's going to be any parallels between the two i mean people people have been overextending themselves for centuries now so i'm sure it's gonna have you know it's gonna be just the same as gonna have companies that leverage themselves to the absolute tits they're gonna take out you know because i mean banks are way more inclined to lend money to you know a fang company or something something along the lines of a tech company all they say is the buzzwords like AI and programming and, you know, this and that green energy in a bank, which is all right, here's a hundred million dollars go fucking crazy with it. And so, yeah, I'm sure that'll happen with some companies. I'm

sure, you know, just like the.com bubble, you know, you'll have a few successful ones stick around like Amazon, but you know, just like everything else, there's a huge gold rush. Everyone's going to rush in, you know, buy shovels, try to start digging themselves some gold. Some companies will find it and some will go bankrupt. That's just how things work. Now, here's a contentious topic. So you guys operate a mining pool. And in the past, we had some mining pools that were offering up the ability to add garbage on the next block like ordinals and vrc20 tokens

have you guys ever been approached by anybody like that because it might have been lucrative for you but at the same time it may have pissed off a whole bunch of other people so i'm not sure if it was a net gain in the end but i was wondering if you've ever been approached to include some of this on the next block uh No, no, we've never been. We've never been approached. We've had a lot of people just kind of like testing our stuff out. But no, I don't foresee anyone going directly to us to do like a marathon type slipstream uh integration or

anything like that i think i think there's a lot of other people that you could go to before us where it would make more sense quite frankly um but but no i mean we're not you know we're not into the whole ordinals uh inscriptions or anything like any stuff like that i mean if you want to pay the fees i mean so be it you know i'll happily mine them you know uh but you know you guys are gambling and you know if you want to gamble on the chain then gamble on the chain i guess and and all of your stats to us because they're in good hands over here so did you hear that marathon's now winding even a shit coin. I forget the name of it,

but it was just today. I heard that today. Fuck is this? Well, anyways, I don't want to talk about marathon too much. This is what you guys, what the fuck?

I heard that today. One of my customers, one of our customers messaged that to me on telegram. And I thought it just kind of looked desperate um from their perspective you know I don't even know I don't know anything about Casper or like even the market cap or like how much uh like what's the daily you know revenue that they're that that they pay out or whatever but you know I if I looked at it I'm sure I would find you know that it's very very small and marathon's probably going

to be at you know they could be at 51 tomorrow it just i don't understand how any of that makes sense and the press release they said you know diversifying revenue and it's like all that sounds like to me is that like you guys suck at mining bitcoin you know like that's just you know like you're diversifying away from Bitcoin mining. But like, you know, where are you going to go to? You know, you go to Casper. Like, how is that any better? You know, it doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

100% agree. Yeah. And did you guys, were you at the mining disrupt that was taking place? I guess this is the last day. That's, or did you guys not attend? No, we haven't been to any conferences um it is my personal goal where i i don't want to go to a conference unless i'm being paid to go to a conference i just i just i don't know it just seems like there's a lot of people there that

aren't again no offense if you went but i mean you know it's you go there to have fun you don't go there to you know be serious about anything go there to, you know, be serious about anything, which is perfectly fine. You know, have your fun. But, you know, I'm busy here working and making sure miners hash. I don't have time to go to conferences and talk about miners hash. And I have enough. I barely have enough time to make miners hash. I can't talk about it.

I got to go to it. That's fair. I guess the last question I have, somebody is asking, do you guys have active endpubs? Are you guys on Oster? I am not. I'm actually not very active on social media at all most of the stuff you see on twitter is mainly steve and i'm i'm not active on that at all i'm i i want to get it's been a goal of mine to get um to get set up on oster so not yet but, but, uh, follow us on Twitter. And when I do get one, I will obviously post it there. Um, but yeah, I'll be following you right from the get-go.

So I want to wrap things up. This is getting close to an hour and I want to thank you guys for taking time to come on the show. But before we do sign off, I just want to hand over the baton to you. Where could people find you? And if you have any last words, anything, the floor is yours guys. Sure.

Uh, yeah, you can find us on Twitter at Wilson mining. And then our website is Wilson mining.io. Um, yeah, I guess final thoughts I can leave you guys with is, you know,

if, if you've kind of dabbled with Bitcoin mining with some success or not a whole lot with is, you know, if, if you've kind of dabbled with Bitcoin mining with some success or not a whole lot of success, you know, this, this industry has been plagued with a lot of people that basically didn't really know what they were doing and, you know, didn't have a lot of experience in Bitcoin, didn't have a lot of experience running a business. And we're just, you know, very unprofessional and, you know, sometimes, you know, fraudulent. Right. And, uh, you know, you can definitely make money Bitcoin mining and it comes with plenty of risks, but, you know, majority of the risk is, is going to be in the guys who are operating the machines. So if you're lucky enough to find, you know, some guys that know what they're

doing and know how to operate the machines correctly and can give you good guidance about, you know, when to buy your machines and maybe when to not buy your machines too. You know, if things are, if prices are looking ridiculous, uh, you know, we'll straight up tell you like, Hey, you know, this is probably not a great, great time to be buying machines. Um, even though it kind of goes against our best interest. Um, so like, you know, we've been expanding a lot this year. And we'll continue to do so. So we're going to have tons of open rack space coming up here. So if you're thinking about it, you know, shoot us a shoot us a DM, shoot us an email, book a book, book a meeting with us over zoom. And we can kind of talk more about it. And yeah, that's kind of that of, that's all I got for you guys.

Awesome. Just curious, one last question I have. Which one of you two are the older? Which is the elder brother? That would be me. I'm a year and a half older than Eric, so not by much. But I don't tell him what to do. I never tell him what to do under any circumstances.

So don't get confused. Very cool. There you go. Steven and Eric Wilson, thank you guys for coming on and check them out. All the information is going to be on the show notes

on both the audio and video. And we'll be back at this again Monday. So until then, take care. Thanks a lot for having us. Are you a fan of the old school NHl 94 game on the genesis or snes why not check out my show the nhl 94 podcast from tournaments and tactics to the people who make up this community check it out wherever you listen to podcasts or find it on youtube