The Wolf Of All Streets - The Future Of Crypto Mining | Peter Wall, Argo CEO

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Today we are joined by the CEO of Argo, Peter Wall. Peter is deeply involved in crypto asset mining and passionate about smart growth. We dive deep into how Argo is securing the power grid in Texas, plans for their future, mining competition, the energy debate, and mining hot spots. We apologize in advance for the echo we had during the recording. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ►► Vauld is a Smart Investing Crypto Platform which allows the user to invest without any stress! With Vauld, you can earn free passive income in crypto. Vauld lets you earn the highest interest rates in the crypto industry - 12.68% on stablecoins and 6.7% on BTC and ETH.. Sign up below and get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts and 5% commission on loan interest. Vauld’s ‘Buy the Dip’ function automatically purchases specific cryptocurrencies for you when the price dips below a pre-set level. It’s awesome! Sign up here: http://thewolfofallstreets.info/vauld EPISODE LINKS Peter Wall: https://twitter.com/petergwall Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

So I think you're going to see this year differentiation based on execution, based on, okay, you said you were going to get to be at five exahash. How many exahash are you at? You said you were going to order 50,000 miners and install them. How many miners have you installed? And I think those are the questions that investors should look at because that tells you how well your team can execute, how well you can run machines. And ultimately that's what this business is, right? Taking, deploying capital and putting it into rigs and infrastructure to mine Bitcoin. It's a fairly This podcast is sponsored by Vauld. Please stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode.

Now, we all know by now that Bitcoin miners are completely destroying the environment and that the planet is probably going to die in the next three years because of them. Just kidding. It's complete FUD and nonsense. Bitcoin miners, in fact, have not only been securing the network, but they've been securing the power grid in places like Texas. Since we've seen the hash rate go offline in China, it's been a huge opportunity for miners in the United States and North America in general, which is now where more than 50% of the hash rate lives. I'm talking to my friend Peter Wall, the CEO of Argo, about

everything that they're building and what's happening in the mining industry, specifically now in the United States. So Elizabeth, last time we talked, last time we talked, you guys were building this mega facility in Texas. And it seems that now we've moved on to Texas being the center in America for Bitcoin mining.

Is that the case? If you build it, they will come. Yes. So last time we talked, we were like, we had this vision to build a flagship facility in West Texas. 200 megawatt facility in Dickens County, which is in the Texas panhandle. So now fast forward to where we are,

and we're about to open it. We just put a new video out this morning. You know, the structure is done. The substation is like 98% done. The immersion systems are being installed. Our operations team is there. Machines are arriving soon. We're energizing the site soon.

So we're like, we are getting ready to go live. And that's a good feeling. I mean, you know, if you think about kind of the structure of the last year and a half for us 2021 was really like the year of getting onto nasdaq getting equity for big future growth and the future growth was going to happen in texas so we've now and we knew that these you know these past six months were the months of execution like head down no new hash rate coming on because the focus was build the infrastructure, install the machines and grow. So we're essentially, you know, on the cusp of that.

And that's, it's a good feeling. Obviously, you know, we're never satisfied until everything is rocking and rolling. But we're in it, we're in a good place. So it sounds like you don't just buy a machine and plug it in. There are people that just buy machines and and plug it in. No more complicated than that. There are people that just buy machines and send them to other facilities and say, here you go. Yeah, charge me my monthly rate. Yeah, exactly.

That's never how we mine. Like right from the start when we started mining at a very small facility in Quebec, we've always been very hands-on. You know, we've been designing, our CTO Perry Hathi has been designing machines prior to him coming to us. He's always been thinking about how to optimize mining. So we're really excited now about being able to build our own custom facility

and then eventually be able to put our own custom rigs into that facility. For now, we have Bitmain machines coming. They're solid, they're good. They're S19s. We have 20,000 coming in starting in May, which we ordered last year. We also have 10,000 machines.

So we've been hosted at CORE for the last two years. We have our own facility in Quebec, but we have two facilities in Quebec. But we have about 10,000 machines, S19s at CORE. We just signed a swap agreement for CORE to take our old machines and to give us brand new machines because they wanted that capacity back for themselves so those are coming at the same time as our 20 000 machines so in the next six months we have 30 000 machines coming for our

new facility and then on top of that we signed a supply agreement with intel so we are one of four companies with working with intel and we just actually just met with them here, which is great. And we will be getting chips from Intel. And then there's two options for us. One is to put them into our own machines, our own custom machines, work with a manufacturer, kind of build a machine from scratch using their chips. And then the other option is to go with an ODM, like a manufacturer that has Intel's design, and Intel's kind of coded, they've co-designed the machine with Intel.

We haven't announced which one we're going to do, but, you know, in general. You can go ahead and do that right now if you want. In general, you know, from our approach, you know, we like to bet on ourselves. So, again, we haven't announced it. We're leaning a certain way, but when the time is right, we'll announce it. You know, Scott, in this space, in the mining space, you need three things. It's a simple business. You need rigs, you need power, and you need capital, right? So if you think about, you know, 2021, we used our NASDAQ IPO and a couple other little fundraisers before that to get the capital we

needed to get the power in the rigs that we needed. We now have an enormous runway of power, 800 megawatts of power in West Texas, in a particular part of the grid where there's an overabundance of renewable energy. That is a lot of it's going to waste because there's not enough transmission lines to take that power to market in southern Texas. Texas is an energy island. You can't export across the state line to New Mexico or to Oklahoma. That power that's generated in Texas has to stay in Texas. It's not connected to the national grid. On top of that, Texas is also a competitive grid. It's a deregulated market, meaning you can buy your power from a host of retailers.

And because of that, ERCOT, who manages the grid, incentivizes large load users like ourselves to participate in these demand response programs, what they call ancillary services. And these ancillary services

allow miners to shut down. Which we've seen. As a moment's notice, you've seen other miners do it. Riot kind of famously has done it at their Windstone facility, and in exchange for giving that power back to the grid you get very low cost power. In fact, even in exchange for being on standby to maybe give your power back to the grid. So just your willingness. Just your willingness to them knowing that you can

act as a virtual power plant, you can act as an escape valve, you know, get out of jail free card, i.e. giving your power back to the grid. You get low-cost power. You guys are like nodes. We are like nodes. And we're in an awesome place because we're in West Texas, up in the Panhandle. I don't know if you've been to the Panhandle. The nearest town to us is 250,000 people. And that's an hour away. They call it the Big Empty. There's not a lot of folks there. The county that we're operating in, wonderful people,

but there's only 3,000 of them. It's very small. So there's not a lot of load. There's just not a lot of power demand in those regions. But there's an overabundance of supply. Texas is the number one wind generator in the United States. It will soon be the number one solar generator. Which people don't think about.

People do not think about that. Right, everybody has the soil sort of vision. So there's all of this power that's being generated and there's nowhere for it to go in many cases. So we're tapping into that grid. We're able to take part in these ancillary services. And that's why there's so many miners moving to Texas. It's literally, and I felt this when I, the first time I went to our site and I stood there, I was like, this is Bitcoin mining nirvana. Like this is perfect. You can see windmills from our site. They're a couple miles away.

There's a McAdoo wind farm, 150 megawatts right there. There's a solar generator that's being built next to us. And there's a substation that has all of that renewable power running through it adjacent to our property. So we feel- Is that an existing substation or something? Okay, because I know you guys built them when you need to. We built our own.

And we'll build that out more as we get to the 800 megawatts. So going back to power, rigs, capital, we've got a ton of power. We've got rigs coming from Bitmain. We've got a supply agreement with Intel to get chips to put them into rigs. So on the capital side, we obviously used our capital from 2021 to get where we are now. So now looking at capital,

you know, looking at this, the second half of this year in 2023, how are we gonna continue to grow? And that's the question that a lot of investors ask, right? They're like, okay, great, Peter, you got all this power. Great, you got a great relationship with Intel. How are you going to fund it? Are you going to sell equity again?

Are you going to dilute us? Or are you going to sell Bitcoin? Are you going to sell Bitcoin? Or are you going to take on debt? I mean, those are the three levers, right? Debt, equity, Bitcoin. So we have not, I'm going to leave you hanging on this because we have not announced our capital plan yet.

We're going to do that. Our numbers are coming out soon. We're a bit later than the US with our numbers because we're UK listed. But we feel like we've got an awesome path to capital to get us to the kind of growth that we need to fully build out the next 800 megawatts over the next couple of years. Okay. So miners obviously have this ability to move to where either the cheap or the renewable, whatever the energy source is, right? You said that the power doesn't really leave Texas. Is that why, I mean, are we going to see miners popping up in random places all over the place?

Or is it really going to start to be super, I don't want to say centralized as a four-letter word, but centralized into these places where you just have this sort of perfect environment for mining. Yeah, I think there's going to be mining hotspots. In short, I think there's going to be both. I think you're going to have the big guys like us, like Riot, like Core, they're going to go to the places where they know there's a regulatory-friendly environment. If you're a miner right now, you're not going to set up a New York state. Wow.

You know? Although, you know, on Seneca Lake, there is a big miner, and they're having a lot of problems. And they're a good example, right? You know, that's a pushback from a state government that started at the local level. That was the local community saying,

there's a problem here. We're going to push back. So if you're looking for your next site, you're going to say, you know what? Until New York gets settled, we're not going to go there. Yeah, we're out of here. That happened in Quebec. In 2018, Quebec government said, too many miners. We got to figure this out. Stop coming. There's a moratorium on new mining. Now they figured it out. They have clear rules and regulations. And Quebec's an okay jurisdiction. It's decent power prices.

If you follow the rules, you're all right. They have curtailment rules in place. It's okay. We mine there. We have two existing locations. And I think folks will continue to mine in Quebec. Bitfarms is obviously really deep into Quebec. Texas is clearly the best in terms of regulatory environment, in terms of price. The problem with Texas is the heat and the dust. It's hot in the summer and it's dusty in a lot of places. So we've decided to build an immersion mining facility to be able to control the dust and the heat.

And immersion is really, we believe, the future of mining. It's the most efficient way to mine. Machines last longer. You can push the machines harder. So we've put the extra kind of capital into building out immersion infrastructure. And I think you're going to see the industry as a whole moving hard into immersion in 2023.

We're a little ahead of the wave. Winstone's a little ahead of the wave with their facility in Texas as well. But to go back to your question, I think Texas is a spot, you know, Washington State, Wyoming, Montana, like these places also going to have some mining. There's also folks who are going to go to where stranded power is around natural gas resources. You know, you've seen like the Crusoe guys telling their story. There's other folks, Jai Mining is doing it. Hard to scale.

You know, you've got a container or some type of unit in the middle of nowhere. You know, we joke we're in the middle of nowhere, but we have a labor force of 3,000 within 10 minutes away, 20 minutes away. We've got a labor force of 250,000 within 10 minutes away 20 minutes away we've got a labor force of 250,000 an hour away are you building a city there we are definitely contributing to the economy in dickens county and we are we are bringing a lot of energy you know we're hiring a lot of local people um but there's already a city there there's a lot there's our community there you know so we're tapping into the community we're working with the with the county

um we're rebuilding the local community pool we're trying to be good community actors um and we're i mean texas is awesome it's also like people are just hardworking yeah so we're excited about being there yeah it's really amazing i feel like you're talking about Intel. It's very real. I feel like that story was just missed. It's Intel. Why isn't everybody talking about the fact that Intel has made a commitment to mining and that this is actually happening? Well, literally, could there have been a bigger piece of news from a bigger company in mining. I think Intel has like purposefully, and you know, we have an agreement with them,

and they are controlling how quickly they want to release the news. They haven't put out the specs, they haven't put out the cost, et cetera. They're working with a small group of miners. A lot of speculation. What's that? A lot of speculation.

I think, you know, they are the first blue chip name in computing to get into crypto mining. Like there's no one else, right? I mean, you know, they are the first blue chip name in computing to get into crypto mining. Like there's no one else, right? I mean, you could argue whether Bitmain's a blue chip name. They're not. They're new. They're a startup.

They're a great company. They're the blue chip name for mining, but they are not a blue chip name. So I'm excited about Texas and I'm excited about Intel. I think that relationship for us is going to be really powerful, really important. And it's early days, you know. But, you know, they initially came to us because of our ESG bona fides. I mean, we've been outspoken about the fact that we think that if mining is going to grow and, you know, be accepted by institutional investors, by mainstream investors, by regulators, it needs to be done in a sustainable way.

And we need to be leading on the ESG initiative. Not everyone agrees with us, but we certainly think that that's important for us as a company and as part of our core values. Intel, when they looked out at the mining landscape, that was their first concern. How are we going to do this? And I don't want to speak for Intel, but our understanding was that was a big concern of theirs. How are we going to do this in a way

that our existing investors and our existing stakeholders are okay with? And I think, so ESG was kind of like, if you look at who they're working with, Hive, Grid, Block, all generally have a certain kind of tact, certain approach to ESG. So that was the kind of way in the door.

And then, I mean, I have to say our technology team, led by our CTO, has really impressed them. And they've had good conversations and Perry's a brilliant miner and I think they recognize that. And we're not the biggest miner out there. We're certainly not the smallest, but we've been around for a long time. We have a very solid reputation in the space. We haven't over-promised ever. We've always said if we're going to do something, we do it. And I think they looked at that and did their due diligence. And now we're on the list and hopefully we'll be

mining with Intel chips very soon. Guys, I have a serious question for you. How much interest are you earning in your bank account? Is it 0.00001% or something similar? We all know by now that there's a better way in crypto, but you want to be using the best platform possible. And that is Vauld. I have been using it myself now for quite a while, earning the highest interest rates in the industry. 12.68% on stable coins, 6.7% on ETH and Bitcoin and earning yield on a ton of other assets. But it's so much more than that, guys. They have a robust exchange. You can swap your coins and they have the amazing automatic investment plan where you can dollar cost average or more importantly, buy the dip automatically. We know that when the dip actually comes, nobody buys it because they're scared. Well, you can automate

that process now with Vauld. Guys, this platform is absolutely incredible. It does everything. They're backed by Pantera and Coinbase Ventures. You really can't ask for anything more. And if you use the link right down below, you get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts, and 5% commission on loan interest. Guys, sign up right now at thewolfofallstreets.info slash Vauld. That's V-A-U-L-D. Do it now. Seriously. I mean, I think last time we spoke and certainly just all of last year,

even through the sort of Bitcoin drop, ESG was the narrative, right? I mean, there were people who said Bitcoin's dumping last April, May, June, and because Elon Musk said that that was big. Feels like that, at least in the mainstream, that narrative has really slowed down. I don't know if that's true. Maybe you can tell me behind the scenes. Is that still the singular thing that you guys have to explain for on a more regular basis? Or is that actually sort of... I don't think it's singular. People understand we've educated these legislators and...

No. No. I mean, I don't think we've won that argument yet. I think it's still an issue. It's not the issue the way it was, but it's still an issue. I mean, if you listen to pushback that you get from, you know, some of the detractors of Bitcoin, and that's one of their main arguments, you know, it's, there's the whole kind of ESG FUD argument. And then generally in our conversations with investors, you know, on the ESG front, they break down into three categories. One, they are very concerned about ESG initiatives and they say, are you doing and this is the future of investing and you know how are you going to make sure that you're climate friendly miner and they really dig into it. Others just want to check the box. Yeah they want to be able to

like tell clients or whatever. And then others like don't care and you know are not at all concerned about ESG. They're really more concerned about, you know, how we're going to, you know, what's our path to growth? What does the future hash rate look like, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's still different demographics amongst investors that we talk to, both on the institutional side and on the retail side, that come with different approaches to the ESG question.

But for us, again, we think it's an important question. It's going to keep coming back into vogue, especially as we reach higher and higher power needs. You know, we started, you know, we were mining with like 400 amps, you know, and then we moved to 5 megawatts, and then we moved to 15 megawatts, and now we're building 200 megawatts, and we want to get to 800 megawatts in the next couple years. And it's a lot of power. I mean, any way you slice it.

You know, the town of Lubbock, city of Lubbock, an hour away from us is 250,000 people. They use 400 megawatts of power. We're trying to be twice that. So that's a lot of power. And, you know, when you add up now, you can always do comparisons either way, right? We're just trying to be twice that. So that's a lot of power. And you know, you add up now, you can always do comparisons either way, right? You know that Bitcoin uses more energy than the entire country of Venezuela, right? Or you can be like, yeah, Bitcoin uses the same energy as Christmas lights, right?

Like there's both extremes. Those washing machines. Exactly. Dryers are crushing us. So we're like in the middle. We're like, yes, we use energy. Yes, we need to do it in a sustainable way. No, we're not moving to proof of stake.

Right. But I mean, isn't it sort of nonsensical to have the energy debate when everything runs on electricity? All that matters is where it comes from. Electric car runs on electricity, but these people are saying you're using too much electricity. So the source is really all that matters, right? I agree. I mean, ultimately, power is a positive development for mankind.

Economies do well when we use energy. Energy use in itself, there's no problem with energy use. It's really about the source of it and the emissions that are related to it. If you're getting power from solar if you're getting power from solar you're getting power from wind you're getting power from hydro what's the problem you're not spitting toxic smoke into the environment and especially where we're setting up in a place like Texas where there's an abundance of power that's going to waste and that's it's going to waste because it can't get to market in an efficient manner. And there isn't these kind of load balancing industries

that are as effective as crypto mining to be a load balancer. So let me explain that a little bit more. So when you look at generation graphs from a nuclear power plant, it goes like this, right? They say they have 200 megawatts, they're putting out 200 megawatts. Maybe it goes up, but when you look at generation from a windmill or from a solar farm, it goes like this because the wind doesn't always blow. The sun doesn't always shine. So the generation that's coming out of renewables needs to be balanced with the load that is using it. So the advantage for miners is

that we can be that balancer. We can shut down during times of peak demand where you're generating this much but supply all of a sudden the demand comes up to here. Supply is here. So then miners can say okay we're gonna help we're gonna come down and reduce the demand. Yeah and there's very few industries that can do that in a large scale. So, you know, that's why when you talk to the folks at ERCOT who manage the grid in Texas, they say, yes, Bitcoin mining can be a solution for us. It can help even out that kind of supply and demand problem that we have. Yeah, it's so interesting.

Maybe we need a new slogan for miners. It's secure the network, secure the grid. I like that. You're not just securing the Bitcoin network anymore. You're literally securing the power grid in Texas. We usually use the word stabilize. Okay, stabilizing the grid. But it works so well with what we say.

I like it. Yeah, it's good. And also it incentivizes more renewables to be built out, right? Because if you're a renewable producer in Texas I like it. Yeah, it's good. And also it incentivizes more renewables to be built out, right? Because if you're a renewable producer in Texas and you're shutting down for certain times of the day, for certain times of the year, you're not getting money. You're not getting paid for that, right? Right. It's a favor. Yeah.

So if you're not getting paid, the economics aren't as good as obviously if you're generating as much power. And then conversely, for retail, for consumers in Texas, wind power is the cheapest power because you don't pay anything for wind. Gas has a value. Like when you burn gas, you're burning a resource. Wind is a free resource. So when more wind can go to market by a stable grid, consumer prices go down. And again, that's not us saying that.

That's power experts in Texas who have studied the grid, who have looked into it over decades. It's been, since the 90s, it's been deregulated, right? So, you know. Yeah. Actual experts and not politicians and pundits. Actually know something and are not just using a talking point. What I find crazy, so we're sitting at the Bitcoin conference 2020 here, obviously, if you walk across the floor, there are so many miners. But I don't know.

I've never heard of most of them. No insult to them. I don't know if they're private. I don't know if they're here to raise money. I don't know if they're here to find clients. You talked about the three things that you need. How much competition do you see coming in as this? I mean, are there a few of you who are so established that it's somewhat irrelevant?

And they're not going to compete anyways? I think so. I think for us, you know, it's kind of looking at, you know, it's quite similar to the cannabis market, right? It's like you go back five or ten years in Canada, there was all these publicly traded cannabis companies that came online, that went public, that listed. And the big guys that had that first mover advantage, they really had an advantage because they were able to build enough equity

and get enough capital to build out their infrastructure and their teams ahead of everyone else trying to get online, everyone else trying to get listed. And now that, you know, the equity market has slowed down for miners in general, it would be a hard time to get listed as a miner right now. The valuations are not what they were. Yeah. So we feel like... It went nuts there for a while. It went nuts for a while. It was a lot of heat in the market. And with new technologies, that's the way it works, right? So we feel like our other companies that are listed in this space, I think this year there's going to be two big trends for big publicly traded miners.

One is you're going to start to see true differentiation. It used to be that a rising tide lifted all boats and we would all move with the price of Bitcoin. I think investors are becoming more savvy about miners and are able to look more at execution, able to look more at more granular metrics than they did in 2021. And so I think you're going to start to see, okay, remember all those miners you said you bought?

Are those actually online? How have you delivered? We saw this with a miner recently who put a big order in with a company. They under-delivered. There was an issue, and their stock went down 30% or 40% in one day. So there was actually a fundamental reason

for this price swing as opposed to, I mean, mining stocks last year traded like leveraged Bitcoin. Correct. Right? Like Bitcoin goes up, they go up twice as much. Bitcoin goes down, they go down three times as much. So I think you're going to see this year

differentiation based on execution, based on, okay, you said you were going to get to be at five exahash. How many exahash are you at? You said you were going to order 50,000 miners and install them. How many miners have you installed? And I think those are the questions that investors should look at because that tells you how well your team can execute, how well you can run machines. And ultimately, that's what this business is, right? Deploying capital and putting it into rigs and infrastructure to mine Bitcoin. It's a fairly simple thing.

The second big thing is because the equity markets are not where they were, debt is a more popular choice for miners than it was in 2021. In fact, the debt market for miners was very immature in 2021. It's matured a lot in the last 12 months. And so now you have NYDIG, Galaxy, DCG signing, doing debt deals. And then you've got new lenders coming into the space that didn't exist before that are looking to get into the market. And then there's lots of miners. So that's on the supply side. On the demand side, you've got all these miners that have made commitments to buy machines. How are they going to pay for that? They can no side. On the demand side, you've got all these miners that have made commitments to buy machines.

How are they going to pay for that, right? They can no longer go out and raise equity or it's a lot harder, a lot steeper. Selling Bitcoin, maybe they haven't built enough of a hodl or maybe one of their core values is we never sell Bitcoin. So that only leaves you with debt. So that debt market is going to tighten and be tough. So that's going to naturally eliminate a lot of these. It's going to be survival of the fittest. And so the miners that have a track record of execution, have a team that knows what they're doing, that have a pathway to power, that have a pathway to rigs. The thing about lenders,

which I've learned over the last six to 12 months, they don't like doing 2 months of due diligence for every deal. They like doing 2 months of due diligence. Hey, Scott. And you're the guy. You're my guy. You're going to come back to me in 3 months or 6 months or 12 months and you got another deal? Let's do it. I know you.

We trust you. So I don't think people talk enough about those relationships. We've built relationships now with lenders where we meet them here. We go out with them. We have a relationship. We get them on the phone. And you can't do that if you're a new miner. You just can't break in because you don't have the track record.

So I think time in the market matters. I think execution matters. And I think this is going to be the year where you're going to start to see differentiation. Is mining going to be centralized in the United States? Is there going to be consolidation? Yeah, centralized maybe perhaps is the wrong word. But since China went offline, now Kazakhstan was one of the places they moved, they're having their own major issues.

Now that we're more friendly, we have states where you can obviously operate. Is this just the natural progression? It's certainly a very good region for mining because of the power costs, because of the regulatory environment. You wouldn't have said that two or three years ago. You wouldn't have, no, because of the entrepreneurial spirit. I mean, I'd say, you know, we're at roughly 50% of the network now in North America between Canada and U.S. Is that going to get to 60%, 70%? Yes. Probably, yeah. I think it probably will. I think South America is interesting.

People are looking there. Now, if you're a NASDAQ listed company, do you want to go South America? Take the government risk and the regulatory risk and the regime change risk. So where else are you going to go? So I do think that, you know, obviously we're very, like, big believers in North America and big believers in Texas. Some geographic diversity, you know, some minors, that's their play. Like, we're going to be across different regions. I think that's one good play. I think what most minors don't talk about is that, for me, the most important relationship is your local relationship. It's not your state relationship. It's not your national relationship. It's how do you behave

in the community you're operating in? And the miners that we've seen get into trouble without naming any names have had issues at the local level, which have then translated to the state level, which have then translated to the national level, right? I swim in that lake. It wasn't really 85 degrees, but yeah. So I think you need to be really smart about, and authentic, about how you operate in a community and build relationships with either the mayor or, for us in Texas, it's the county judge and the council there and the community and be good actors in the community and build good relationships. And we've tried to do that in Quebec. We've tried to do that, and we're doing that in Texas.

And ultimately, I think, you know, then when they talk to their state governments, when they talk to other counties, I mean, our county judge in Texas not that long ago said to me, listen, Peter, I get calls all the time. This is interesting. From other county judges in other regions of Texas. And they say to me, hey, I know you got Argo setting up there. Would you recommend having a Bitcoin mining company come to our region? Because how's the experience been with you? And he said to them, maybe. He didn't say yes, but he said, often I say no, depending on how they're behaving, how they're acting, how, how, depends on the minor, how are they, what kind of people are

they? Like, what kind of commitment do they have to the community and to, you know, being good actors? So that matters. And I think there's not enough talk about that, that local actions matter. They have an impact on the state and the national level. That makes perfect sense. Where can everybody keep up with what you guys are doing and follow you on the social media? On the socials, yeah. So we have a very active Twitter account, at Argo Blockchain. We just put out a new video today. We put out videos quite often. I'm at PeterGWall on Twitter. And then we've got a pretty active YouTube page as well. And then our website, argoblockchain.com.

The growth is inspiring, man. I really love to see it. Thank you. You should come and visit. I want to go. I want to do that. Let's do that. But I think just every six months we can talk about it and laugh about how far it's come in.

Thank you so much. It's so nice to finally meet you in person. Get out, get out from behind the screens and, uh, and do this on the couch. So thank you, man.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you haven't already left a rating or a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, please do that now. Spotify just added rating. So please go ahead and click that five star. I'll see you guys next time.