S16 E15: Marko Tarman on NiceHash & Proof of Work Mining

Full Transcript of My Interview with Marko Tarman:

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Vlad Costea 00:01:16 Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. This is season 16, episode 15 and we are here with Marko Tarman from NiceHash. If you’ve been in this space long enough, then you have heard about the expression “nicehashable”, which means you can rent enough hash power hash rates to be able to 51% attack a network. And for a while this was an important metric and NiceHash. Last year in November, if I’m not mistaken, has turned ten years old. You had this anniversary party? I was invited there. It was nice to speak on stage, and we were supposed to do this interview at the time. But you’re super busy with organizing stuff, but I’m really happy that we can do this right now. And right here. Marko. It’s good to have you.

Marko Tarman 00:02:05 Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. I’m super, super excited that you can finally record this.

Vlad Costea 00:02:11 Right. So, what do you do at NiceHash?

Marko Tarman 00:02:15 Well, my official title is lead mining manager. But when it comes to, let’s say, medium sized companies, in terms of employees, everyone must wear many hats, so do I.

Marko Tarman 00:02:29 So I mostly take care of mining site of the marketplace, which includes business development, some marketing, key account management, product management and all this or all these things kind of merge into one, role. And I have that role.

Vlad Costea 00:02:52 Well, it sounds exciting. Is mining still as popular as it used to be? I see that most of the projects launching nowadays, they just go proof of stake. They don’t care too much about decentralization as back in the day. I remember when I first got in, every coin was proof of work and they were experimenting with various algorithms. Some of them even had multiple mining algorithms that they were using for, I guess, consecutive blocks to interchangeably switch.

Marko Tarman 00:03:23 I think that was that was a Raven. 616 or how was it called the before? It was 616 or something. And there was actually 16 different algorithms inside one. I think that’s what you’re talking about.

Vlad Costea 00:03:40 Yeah. I remember at one point there was Virge, and that one got 51% attacked in 2018 or something.

Vlad Costea 00:03:46 And one of the existing algorithms.

Speaker 3 00:03:51 Yes, probably.

Vlad Costea 00:03:53 So is proof of work still a big deal?

Marko Tarman 00:03:57 Bands from what perspective are you looking for or asking? Because from, let’s say from miner’s perspective, there’s just a few coins that are still available and people still have interest in, you know, miners are mostly profit oriented, and they will only mine coins that have, enough profits for them to be sustainable. So if there’s a coin that or if there’s a coin that’s that maybe has zero potential zero usage and the price is not high enough, people won’t make it, obviously. So the first thing to think about is, is the project interesting for the for the general public? Because if people are using it like they are using Ethereum, for example, then there will be enough, volume on it, enough usage. And the price of the coin normally does go up. Or at least it’s evolving. And then you will have miners. But if the projects are like shit projects, then you wouldn’t see as much of traffic on it.

Marko Tarman 00:05:08 No usage. And there there wouldn’t be any mining at the end of the day. So there’s no security of that project and it all goes hand in hand. but from the token perspective, like from new coins and stuff, as you said, there’s a lot of proof of stake proof shit. coins. you you can also, like, think from the through the same eyes or watch from the same eyes that if because they might know that there’s not going to be as much usage of the coin. And this means there’s going to be enough miners mining the on the project, on the blockchain. They rather launch a proof of stake, coin in order to to have a decently or not decently or have some sort of security better than a few miners.

Vlad Costea 00:06:03 Yeah. It’s definitely interesting how the dynamics have evolved. Nice hash. Is this service that opened up a marketplace for hash rate. And let’s say that you have a I think nice hash is not for A6 specifically because A6 can only mine one type of algorithm.

Vlad Costea 00:06:23 But if you have GPUs, I think you’re searching for the coin that is most profitable. And nice hash makes that very easy for you to use your GPU rig to mine whatever works and whatever makes most income.

Marko Tarman 00:06:37 That’s not entirely true, actually. The three biggest algorithms for marketplaces analysis are all basic, algorithms. So the best one is to find 256. The second biggest one is script algorithm, which is for Dogecoin, Litecoin mining, sometimes bells, coin mining or any other script coin actually. And the third biggest one is hash marketplace where buyers can buy or sellers can sell the hash hash hash rate. But yeah, back in the day, true power was in profit switching for GPU miners. And that’s how Nexus actually grew a lot, especially in the Ethereum days. what nice offers is what I like to say two layer profits. You think first layer would be on the algorithm itself. So you have one algorithm, for example, let’s say script algorithm and buyers who are buying this algorithm hash rate will be mining different coins.

Marko Tarman 00:07:44 For example, they can buy my Litecoin became mine. Dogecoin became my my better coin. I think there is another, script coin. They can do merge mining. They can do what they can by the hash rate to mine any coin that’s running script, even if that’s newly launched. I know Vlad coin. and it’s if it’s running on script, buyers can buy the hash rate, and they can they decide where they will send the hash rate, and they normally send it to the coin. That’s the most profitable at that moment, because they will be doing arbitrage trading with the hash rate. So that’s the first layer. Even if you’re mining on Sha 256, there’s different coins that are mineable with that algorithm. And there are buyers who identify different opportunities and direct buy a lot of hash rate for a short amount of time, let’s say a day, maybe two, but they’re willing to pay more than the buyers buying the hash rate for Bitcoin mining. That’s the first layer. Then we have the second layer which is only applicable applicable on GPU mining.

Marko Tarman 00:08:52 So because Asics can only mine one algorithm, but the GPUs can mine different algorithms. So a GPU might might be used for heavy not sorry, capo EDC, hash beam or some other algorithm. And whenever the highest paying the algorithm that’s highest paying, then the miners will be sent to that algorithm. So, for example, if I have a GPU running on, and there’s a very high price for my compute power on Capo algorithm, then my GPU will start mining or selling the hash rate for capo buyers. You know, that’s the second layer of profit switching, which is only applicable for GPUs. I hope that that makes sense.

Vlad Costea 00:09:49 Yeah, I’ve interviewed on the show some people, for example, there is a privacy project called Beam, which is based on the minimal Wimple protocol. And there are also the people from Decred, and they were quite unhappy with the evolution of proof of work because they said there is far less. How should I put it? Commitment and users and most of them just mine, whatever is most profitable.

Vlad Costea 00:10:17 And they were a bit disillusioned with how proof of work actually works for their networks, because most miners come and go and whenever the price goes down, they see large amounts of miners dropping and they sort of blamed it on nice hash. And for me, it was very funny because I understand that there is a market for this and everyone wants to maximize the revenue.

Marko Tarman 00:10:39 Yes. Look, we are the only hash rate through hash rate marketplace, so there’s no other player in the industry where you can platform where you can buy or sell the hash rate, within seconds. You know, there’s no contracts. There are no there’s no forwards. Everything is happening in real time. and this gives people an ability to have a second market, you know, apart from that, where only blockchain is issuing the rewards, you know, there’s humans that are willing that have some, feelings on what, what to mine and do that profits, which I was talking about before. And I think that’s quite important to have in the ecosystem.

Marko Tarman 00:11:27 Like it’s the secondary market for the hash rate actually, where humans are the ones that are setting the price. And regarding your, statement that Nitish is the blame for it. We just made things easier. So if there’s a GPU miner that has an option to mine five different coins, they would have to do manually switches between different algorithms all the time, you know? So if back in the day Ethereum was the most profitable, they had to find a pool for Ethereum. They had to set up a wallet, they had to mine on that pool. And then when I don’t know, Beem was more profitable, that the same miner would have to switch to mining boom boom coin. And he would he would left some dust on the first pool, and start mining on beam and then exchange beam to the preferred currencies. And then they have to do this step, these steps all over again for the third coin. For the fourth coin. And there’s a lot of manual work, whereas there’s, there was the buyer who did that.

Marko Tarman 00:12:36 and in my opinion, this would have happened anyway. You know, people would just go where there’s more profits that just sadly, that’s the nature of mining. There’s only a few people that truly care about projects. I’m talking about the miners. There’s only a few miners that truly care about projects, about coins securing the network. But 90% of miners are profit oriented. It’s business for them.

Vlad Costea 00:13:05 Yeah, I forgot to mention the sponsors of the show during the intro, so I’m gonna say them now. It’s SideShift, Citrea, Layer Two Labs, Bitcoin.com News, NoOnes.com, and HODLing.ch. Thank you for supporting the show. Now, I got to ask you, Marko, and I’m gonna try to share this on the screen. There’s this website that’s called crypto 51 dot app, and it has most of the proof of work coins in a table with their symbol and market cap and mining algorithm. Current hash rate, one hour attack cost and there is zero percentage which is called nice hashable.

Vlad Costea 00:13:42 So basically how likely it is for you or how much of this hash rate to 51% attack you can rent on nice hash. Let me send this to you so you also see it. I was going to ask you what it means for some of these coins. For example, there’s Pirate chain which is 269% nice hashable. What does this mean?

Marko Tarman 00:14:12 Okay, so. Let me check. yeah, I know, I know, yeah, I know, I know the website. Okay, so first thing to note is that all of the buyers are nice. Hash must complete KYC before buying any hash rate. So even if there was a player that wanted to hurt a project, they would be able. I mean, he basically gave out all the identification documents and there’s I think nobody’s stupid enough to do that. then for the for what does it mean? Do you want me to explain what does that mean? Or nice hashable or.

Vlad Costea 00:15:02 Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s useful.

Marko Tarman 00:15:05 Okay. So it means that you can buy.

Marko Tarman 00:15:10 So let’s explain the 51% attack first. So in order to attack a project, you can do a double spend problem, double spend on the network on the coin. So you can spend the same coin twice. And in order to do that you need to have at least 51% of the hash rate, theoretically, to, Up to do the double spend. But keep in mind that this only gives you 1% over what the other, chain has, so it will still need a lot of luck to do that with 51% of the hash rate. Actually, you would need about 80%. Let’s say that you would have consistent blocks and that you would grow the hash rate way faster, the chain way faster than the than the actual miners. and. Yeah. If the nicest owns enough hash rate or not owned. Sorry if nice. If a buyer can buy enough hash rate through nice hash, they can direct that to their own solar pool and they can manipulate the blocks, how they want. Theoretically. I’m not sure if I explain that good enough.

Marko Tarman 00:16:28 but essentially, if there’s more than 51% of, Network Coins network hash rate available to be bought through naysayers, then that could pose a threat for the project.

Vlad Costea 00:16:40 Well, yeah, you can also 51%, as in obtain 51% of the hash rate and just get the majority of rewards.

Marko Tarman 00:16:51 Yeah, getting the rewards. I think it’s not easy to actually for the security of the project.

Vlad Costea 00:16:58 Oh, I’m just saying you can do this. Doesn’t mean it’s the most rational approach.

Marko Tarman 00:17:03 Yeah. but still, I’ve been with NASA for seven years, and I’m not aware of any such, like, such thing that happened. And to be frank, if there’s a shit coin that’s running, an algorithm that the developers didn’t have, resources to develop their own algorithm. Then they pretty much it was their own mistake. Because if I create a coin on, Sha 256, then a slightly bigger mining farm can control the whole hash rate of my whole project. So if you want to have a decentralized, proof of work coin, it’s very advisable to build your own or develop your own algorithm that, you have that there’s not many Asics available for that algorithm.

Marko Tarman 00:17:59 No.

Vlad Costea 00:18:01 Right. Now, how many of these mining algorithms are you aware that exist?

Marko Tarman 00:18:08 I have no idea how many nice hash algorithms.

Vlad Costea 00:18:12 At least how many of them you support a nice hash.

Marko Tarman 00:18:16 Oh, we support about 30 algorithms. Different algorithms. Keep in mind that majority of them have, just a small amount of hashrate available now. Like I said, the majority of hashrate we have or the volume we have or is on Sha, we have hash in script, marketplaces I think on for example, on heavy hash we have about 3% of Caspa network, roughly speaking. So it’s a very small amount of hash that we own compared to the network hash rate. on the Bitcoin network we have about 1%, of network hash rate. So Bitcoin is definitely not nice. Hash table. and on script I think we have about 5% of dogecoins hash rate.

Vlad Costea 00:19:13 Does nice hash mine at all or do you only offer the marketplace for it?

Marko Tarman 00:19:19 We are a software company. we don’t own any hardware apart.

Marko Tarman 00:19:24 For one for testing. So we are involved in mining.

Vlad Costea 00:19:31 I think that’s an important distinction to make because you’re just the middleman enabling the marketplace to live and for the miners to direct hashrate wherever the market. There is money, you know.

Marko Tarman 00:19:45 Yeah. I mean, yeah, we are just a broker of hashrate, but we don’t buy or sell the hash rate. We just connect buyers and sellers. We’re just a platform that allows buyers and sellers to to make. It’s kind of like electricity grid, where the electricity grid is the one that allows, power plants to connect with, electricity buyers. So maybe you at home. So we’re just that utility grid for hash rate?

Vlad Costea 00:20:17 Yeah, it’s definitely interesting. I’m looking right now at Add the list of algorithms you support from Sha to 56. What’s the difference between ASIC boost and normal Sha 256. By the way.

Marko Tarman 00:20:32 So Bec, I think in 2018 there was a protocol improvement which allowed ASIC to use less electricity for the same amount of work. So basically I think this started in the S9 era, and you could drop the power consumption by 20% by using the AC boost protocol.

Vlad Costea 00:20:56 But wasn’t disabled when SegWit came around. If I recall correctly, I think it only works on Bitcoin Cash.

Marko Tarman 00:21:03 No, it works on normal Bitcoin. at the time there was no Asics that actually supported that. You had to upgrade the firmware. So it’s there was a software solution on both sides. So on Bitcoin and also on the on the minor side, but it definitely is still around because everyone is using AC boost right now. If you’re using, any minor, any AC right now, it’s running AC protocol. We’re just we just, left it running for technical reasons. I mean, the naming is stay the same.

Vlad Costea 00:21:40 So now let me ask you the question that maybe every miner will ask when they listen to this interview. Why would they work with nice hash? Why would they sell their hash rate to nice hash as opposed to celo mining, or as opposed to joining a pool?

Marko Tarman 00:22:00 Because of the reasons I explained before, because there’s profits between, two layer profits teaching for ASIC miners, there’s one layer profit switching, which means that the buyers are always buying the hash rate to mine the most profitable coin.

Marko Tarman 00:22:19 And essentially, that means that the seller is always selling the hash rate to the buyer who’s paying the most for that hash rate. And that’s especially noticeable on script algorithm and Casp algorithm, where the buyers are doing wonders with the hash rate and essentially the rates on basically the majority of algorithms experience some sort of spikes quite often. So you would like just if at the end of the February, there was a huge spike by about 40% higher periods for a few hours on on Sha algorithm. So miners mining at that point earned about 40% more than other other miners using pools. That’s just one of the reasons, like we are fully we are also fully, regulated in Switzerland, which comes in handy for institutional miners because we are, compliant and audited. We also have all of the, features or products, you would expect from any other mining pool. And we also have a very detailed statistics about the worker, about the worker that’s mining through nature. So you would not only see the accepted and rejected spit on, the Nicer, you would also see the type of rejects for each worker for the past seven days, which is I think we’re one of the few, if not the only ones.

Marko Tarman 00:24:04 we’re offering this kind of detailed view for the for the miners, not to mention the, the different products that we offer. So from asset manager the firmware the custom firmware for, Bitcoin and custom miners. And yeah, that’s just a few of the benefits that I can think of right now.

Vlad Costea 00:24:27 Is it possible for someone who maybe has a powerful gaming computer and cannot bind Bitcoin with that, because it’s not very efficient to mine something else designated by nice hash, but receive their rewards in Bitcoin. And if yes, how popular is this feature?

Speaker 3 00:24:45 You see, I.

Marko Tarman 00:24:47 I forgot the most important part when you ask when you ask me the previous question. So yeah, obviously the bitcoin payouts are quite a big benefit, especially if you’re using GPU as you said. But more importantly, if you’re mining, with heavy hash async or script ASIC, you know, selling the hash rate to get bitcoins is quite beneficial. Instead of just, mining Litecoin, Dogecoin and then have to exchange that to to Bitcoin through an exchange, then you have additional work, you pay additional fees for the exchange, etc..

Marko Tarman 00:25:28 So definitely Bitcoin payouts are one of the biggest advantages on Irish.

Vlad Costea 00:25:35 I remember at one point I think it was Anthony Pompliano who is usually referred to as pump. He released his ASIC miner. No, it wasn’t an ASIC miner. It was a home mining device. It was commodified to the point where you just plugged it and connected it to the internet and was working, and it was just, I think a Radeon 480 GPU with an Intel Celeron processor sold for $700 or something. But the point is that I think it was connecting to a nice hash or a similar service, but it claimed to offer you payouts in Bitcoin. So people bought that thinking that they’re actually mining bitcoin, which is funny.

Speaker 3 00:26:20 Yeah.

Marko Tarman 00:26:21 Like there’s a lot of people still don’t understand how nice it works. Many people think that we’re doing is exchanging on cash. But in reality the buyers are paying for your hash rate in Bitcoin. So if theoretically we would change that to USD, then the buyer the sellers would get paid in USD.

Marko Tarman 00:26:45 and yeah, that’s that’s something that people don’t understand about Nitish and they don’t understand how they can mine bitcoins with their GPUs right now.

Vlad Costea 00:27:00 What are the most popular mining algorithms and what are the most profitable ones actually.

Marko Tarman 00:27:08 Or GPUs or Asics?

Vlad Costea 00:27:10 Both.

Marko Tarman 00:27:13 I mean, for GPUs. If I’m not mistaken, Leo is quite high, but honestly, I haven’t been following, the GPUs seen so much lately. there’s, you know, since Ethereum went to a proof of sheet, they, the GPUs have been jumping around different algorithms all the time. So as soon as one small coin is, you know, how the price increases of these coins for like, 100%, within a few hours. And at that point, it might be beneficial to mine that coin, but it’s only for about a few hours, maybe a day, maybe two days, until more miners join in the difficulty jumps and then the periods drop, and then they go back to the previous most profitable coin. And I think this is happening a lot right now.

Marko Tarman 00:28:04 So in that case, I think nicer is still the best option because they will do all the hard work for the miner. from the AC perspective, it depends on the AC bye, of course, but I would say that, script is quite profitable right now with the new airline machines. But again, it comes down to the investment versus the revenue. You know, there’s different, different things to look about. Look around when talking about profitability on ASIC algorithms, it’s not so simple.

Vlad Costea 00:28:47 I’m not sure if I misheard it, but did you refer to Proof of Stake as proof of shit?

Speaker 3 00:28:52 Yes.

Vlad Costea 00:28:53 Why is that?

Marko Tarman 00:28:55 Don’t you think it’s the same?

Vlad Costea 00:28:57 Well, it’s not about what I think. I’m just trying to understand how you think.

Marko Tarman 00:29:01 I mean, it’s it’s also just a joke. but it’s also partly true because, of course, from the decentralization, perspective, proof of work is more, secure. It’s easier to ramp up your market share or your network share through mining. And it also fucked up a lot of GPU miners.

Marko Tarman 00:29:31 Or the GPU miners that there were on Ethereum. There was a lot of hobbyist miner. I, I know a nice there was a lot of people from countries where earning $3 per day was a lot for them. They I even received personally emails from people in third world countries saying that they think nice because, they can provide to their families with, simple mining rig. you know, and this Proof of stake. Move pact. A lot of this, hobbyist miner. Let’s say smaller miners. And since then, mining has become an a business that only bigger players can join in profitably. I’m talking about, of course, people can buy smaller basic machines like Btcs. but they’re not going to make a living out of it. You know, I’m talking about, again, these people who can barely afford, a GPU, or maybe get it somewhere secondhand. But now they they’re they were they are left out of the game.

Vlad Costea 00:30:43 I think proof of work is definitely the fairest way to distribute, because you get a free market of hash rate and you get participants competing for the rewards in proof of stake.

Vlad Costea 00:30:56 It’s all about how much of a stake you acquire with Resources that you have from somewhere else. So if you’re rich, you’re gonna be able to buy a large stake, and then you’re also going to earn higher rewards. But the reason why it’s so popular, on one hand, it’s because regulators I guess they were fooled by the whole environmental argument, and they decided that they should leave it alone, even though it’s it’s pretty close to a Ponzi, if you ask me, because you can create a token out of nothing and then sell it to people and secure the system through the fact that some people stake it, which means that they don’t sell it.

Marko Tarman 00:31:38 Yeah.

Vlad Costea 00:31:39 Yeah. But on the other hand, it also gives some developers peace of mind from the fact that they can get 51% attacked because they might be a minority chain in terms of hash rate. They did not write their own mining algorithm, so they are constantly under the threat of getting attacked.

Marko Tarman 00:32:00 Look like I explained before. Any legit developers, any legit project will develop their own algorithm.

Marko Tarman 00:32:08 They will have to put some extra efforts for doing it, but they will have a new algorithm. They will have zero basic manners at the time of launch. They will have GPU miners on it, and the GPU miners will slowly ramp up the the hash rate, which which is exactly what you were saying, like the reward from the blockchain will come slowly towards the miners and the miners will slowly take over the they will slowly grow the network hash rate. Whereas with a proof of stake you can simply buy in 50% and. And have the control of the network.

Vlad Costea 00:32:53 You’ve mentioned the situation of Ethereum a few times and I was wondering, why do you think the hash rate did not go to Ethereum Classic, which was created exactly for this? It was waiting for this moment when proof of stake happens, and they were supposed to take the miners, but it seemed like there was also a fork from Ethereum that tried to be the proof of work fork. And I don’t know exactly what happened.

Marko Tarman 00:33:21 From my understanding, the issue is that there is not enough people using the the Ethereum Classic and the price is too low.

Marko Tarman 00:33:31 So if there was more profits when mining Ethereum Classic, there would be more miners mining it. you know, if the price of the Ethereum Classic will grow, then there will be more miners and the profitability will come back. And as I said in the beginning, miners are profit oriented. Nobody’s willing to pay Hundred dollars or euros per month for electricity in order to support a project. I’m talking about residential miners. So they are after profits. And if they don’t make, they aren’t breakeven. They’re not going to support the coin.

Vlad Costea 00:34:15 Yeah, that’s a good point. Let me plug a couple of sponsors, and then I will ask you about the profitability of mining from a historical point of view, because some OGs say it was never really profitable to mine. And even back in the day when you could do it on your laptop, you’re not really making a lot of money if you sold immediately. But before that, I gotta tell you about site shift, which is this place where you can swap pretty much every coin with low fees and there’s a lot of liquidity for it.

Vlad Costea 00:34:47 I think for small amounts you don’t have to register or do any sort of KYC. I think for large amounts they ask you for some documents, and let’s say that someone pays you in stablecoins and you don’t want to hold on to stablecoins because I guess we’re still in a bull market. You can swap it for free market money, even if it’s Bitcoin, even if it’s like coin, even if it’s trump coin. I’m not going to judge you for your choices, but you can do that on site shift and the fees are pretty low. So check out signify. And I think they’re also integrated in edge Wallet and Cake Wallet and Bitcoin.com wallet and a few others. So you might be using it even if you don’t know about it. And there’s also Bitcoin.com News, which recently has been doing a pretty good job. Now they know the difference between BTC and BCH, and they have some good geopolitical news. They have some good gold news, which I read recently because ironically, gold is hitting all time highs and Bitcoin is not.

Vlad Costea 00:35:56 It’s a pretty funny situation. We were supposed to flip gold when moon and check out Bitcoin.com on the news section. They have pretty good journalism. They’re less biased than Bitcoin magazine when it comes to American politics. They also present some news from India, from China, from Russia. And to me, that’s pretty interesting because it doesn’t only focus on one part of the world as being the one that’s important. And now, Marco, I, I have a friend who has been in Bitcoin since 2010. He was making videos about it, like in the summer of 2010, when he was much younger and people were making fun of him in the comments that the price is only a few cents and it dropped and I want to know. He told me that mining was never really profitable, and even back in the day, you had to pay a lot of money for your electricity and there was no guarantee that you’re gonna make it back. Of course, in hindsight, if you held your coins and you did not sell the bitcoins to pay the electricity bill, you would get very rich.

Vlad Costea 00:37:07 But do you think this model is still sustainable? Should miners still Hodl and based on your experience, was mining always this industrial and all this intimidating where it seems like it’s a bit too late for you to join into mine?

Marko Tarman 00:37:26 I would partially agree with your friend. I remember when I started mining back in 2012. There was a small short period where mining was quite profitable, but then shortly after you were barely making it even. One. And there were always these circles of profitability where mining was more profitable for maybe a few weeks, a few months. And that’s when people started buying more machines. You know, getting into the mining. But as soon as people did that, the difficulty would rose and you started earning less. And then again, people started dropping off, turning off their machines, and you were kind of making some money, but not that much money again, until there was a new bull run. And just in late 2022 or maybe in 2021, the GPU mining was very profitable.

Marko Tarman 00:38:31 With 130, 90, you would be making maybe $10 per day or even more. But yeah, again, when people started mining more and more, the profitability would go down. So Essentially there were some times where mining was profitable, but it’s a lot. You would get a lot of advantage if you already owned the machines. So one of my biggest mistakes was that every cycle, which at the time I wasn’t aware of cycles, I sold all of my GPUs. I did that twice. And third time when I didn’t sell them. is actually when I made the most money, because I was barely making it. Even I was covering the costs of electricity through my pocket, you know, from the salary. And that’s when I staked the most bitcoin. But then again, how much difference would it have made if I just bought Bitcoin at that time? It’s hard to tell. Probably I would have roughly the same amount. so yeah, to answer your question about if, What was the question again?

Vlad Costea 00:39:46 Well, there were two sides of it that there was the one about the historical perspective.

Vlad Costea 00:39:53 And wait, what what was the other point?

Marko Tarman 00:39:56 If it’s still US industrialized or something like that?

Vlad Costea 00:40:00 Yeah, yeah. Today it seems very intimidating to enter the market to become a miner. And it seems like it’s almost too late, you know. Was it always like this? You looked at it and you’re like, oh, with my GPU miner, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

Marko Tarman 00:40:14 Well, I think the difference is that a lot of people own GPUs, whereas pretty much nobody owns an ASIC machine. So in order to start mining, you know, to test the thing, you just have to ramp up your like install and start mining. It literally takes a minute and you get to experience mining. And then you can decide, okay, this does make some money. I’m willing to invest in a couple of more GPUs and a couple more mining rigs, but now there’s really hard to start mining. First of all, Asics machines are quite expensive compared to GPUs. I mean, there’s lines that go up to, you know, €8,000, it doesn’t $8,000 or even more, which is a problem on its own.

Marko Tarman 00:41:08 But also the machines are loud. They they use a lot of electricity, which you don’t have. You don’t have the breakers in your home to support them. You know, these kind of things, do not make retail mining easy. So, yeah, going into a mining business right now from ground zero is intimidating, I would say. But back in the day, you know, you just ramp up a GPU and that’s it.

Vlad Costea 00:41:39 Yeah. I guess these guys who mind like yourself from the early days and without any guarantee or any idea how successful this can become, I don’t think back in 2012, when you started mining, you could even imagine that one Bitcoin could reach $100,000.

Marko Tarman 00:41:59 Yeah. Definitely not. I was, I think, 16 at the time. I was, you know, just following my older brother. And I remember Bitcoin was, I think about 20 or 200 per, per piece, per per coin. And yeah, obviously I had no idea that it has such a potential.

Marko Tarman 00:42:21 You know, I remember back in the day, I was, you know, always trying new things out. There was platforms where you could click on ads, get some tokens for it, and then get, I know, a cheaper, I know gaming mouse or something like that. And it was all basically a scam. So I thought, okay, this must be a scam also. but then, yeah, I got some bitcoins. I sold them quickly. I bought some, some games, you know, for, for gaming, etc..

Vlad Costea 00:42:53 On steam or what?

Marko Tarman 00:42:56 through Blizzard’s store.

Vlad Costea 00:42:58 Oh, they were accepting bitcoin back in the day.

Marko Tarman 00:43:01 No, no, no, I exchanged it of course. Of course. Yeah.

Vlad Costea 00:43:05 So what’s the game that you bought for super high price.

Marko Tarman 00:43:09 I actually bought packages of cards inside Hearthstone if you know the game. Yeah. So I then it just I think soon after the, when I started mining or a couple years later I started playing that and I just had some pocket money, you know, to buy these packages.

Marko Tarman 00:43:27 And I had a lot of good cards, but yeah.

Vlad Costea 00:43:31 Yeah, I was gonna say before I interrupted mid-sentence that you guys are like the heroes of the project because you secured it when there was almost no guarantee that it’s going to succeed over the long term. And I’ve also spoken to a guy who said he was purchasing ASIC miners in 2013, and he sold some bitcoin to buy Butterfly Labs basic miners. There were some that he received. There were some that he never received, and he could never make back the bitcoin that he spent on Asics because the price went up, the hash rate went up. And he was hoping that, okay, I sold this bitcoin, but now I’m gonna have much more hash power, so I’m gonna make it back. It did not work like that.

Marko Tarman 00:44:18 No. So I’ve got a lot to say around this. First thing is I my first A6 that I bought was D3. antminer D3. And I remember at the time there was, like a rule Especially everyone was talking on bitcoin talk that never buy through a reseller, always buy through the official, official manufacturer.

Marko Tarman 00:44:42 So I went on Bitmain and I started refreshing the page because I knew that I know at midnight the machine would be listed. So I went on the page, started refreshing the the web page. But there was so much traffic on it that I couldn’t get through to make an order. So but once I got through it, I paid. I still think it if I remember correctly, it was 0.5 for bitcoins for the antminer, but it took them three months to ship it to me because it was like a prior pre-order or something like that. And by the time I got like at the time of order, it said, that I was going to make about $30 per day. By the time I got it, it was only $3. And that’s the amount of electricity I would pay daily. So I just. I never run that machine. Not for a single day, but I spent half a bitcoin for it. It was the worst. The worst. that’s a mining related decision I made. And since then, I’ve been hating.

Marko Tarman 00:45:50 not for a long time after that, I’ve been hitting, ASIC machines.

Vlad Costea 00:45:56 It’s pretty crazy when you think about it. I’ve heard stories of people receiving used miners, even if they ordered from the official store.

Marko Tarman 00:46:06 I guess that’s also true. I at the time haven’t looked into it that much to check if there’s any dust or stuff like that on it, but it was a common practice. Of course. Why would you sell a machine if you can make, the if you can make a double the money in a few few months, then by then opposed to selling the machine?

Vlad Costea 00:46:31 It’s such a crazy industry when you think about it.

Marko Tarman 00:46:35 I mean, I think we’re in a process or like before it was Wild West, you know, from the mining perspective. And we are already in that more, regulated environment. We’re moving towards that regulation where many people aren’t really a fan of, but because there’s only machines, because the mining has become business, where only the companies are doing it in majority, I think, it will become regulated, industry.

Marko Tarman 00:47:15 And one of the, let’s say, reasons is because we’ve let mining become GPU miners. We let down the GPU miners. If there were still GPU miners, there would be hobbyist miners. and I think there wouldn’t be such high regulation as we’re seeing in the next years.

Vlad Costea 00:47:40 If I understand correctly, you’re not a fan of basic miners.

Marko Tarman 00:47:45 No, that’s that’s not true. Like, I, I am a fan of basic mining, but at the time when I made my first decision to buy an AC machine, I, I kind of hated it at that point. Yeah, I’m not saying that regulation is bad because there’s ASIC mining, but I’m saying that if there was more GPU mining, then that might be better for for decentralization, for, for masses. You know, for the people.

Vlad Costea 00:48:20 Why do you think we got to this point where we only have 2 or 3 manufacturers of basic miners Because naturally, the solution for this situation where you get maybe used miners and by the time you get them, they’re not very profitable anymore.

Vlad Costea 00:48:37 The solution is to have more competition, to have more chip makers enter the market and deliver a product that’s so good that it pushes everyone to innovate. But we haven’t seen much of that.

Marko Tarman 00:48:51 I don’t know. my guess would be, first of all, I don’t think that Bitmain or other manufacturers are still running the machines at scale as they did before. You know, before selling the the machines. I think that they just manufacture them and ship out. but maybe the reason is that Bitmain is simply too big. they can manipulate the prices of coins. there are patterns. I’m not saying anything, but there are patterns But before they announce a new machine for a new algorithm, the price of that coin does ramp up. Exactly. That happened on custom machines when they announced, Casper Asics. maybe they’re just too big, you know, to to fight against. I don’t have a strong opinion why this has happened.

Vlad Costea 00:49:57 Well, maybe that they’re big, but at the same time, Samsung is a much bigger chip manufacturer.

Vlad Costea 00:50:03 Qualcomm is a much bigger chip manufacturer. Intel, AMD, all of these companies, even Apple, they have not tried to compete with Bitmain. And right now, Bitcoin is a much bigger deal than it was before. Yet I haven’t heard announcements about other companies entering the market to compete with and miners and what’s. Miners and what else is popular?

Marko Tarman 00:50:31 Avalon. Avalon is is the third biggest one. But there are some US based companies that are starting to do it already. For example, if you heard about them, there’s big deals ASIC.

Vlad Costea 00:50:47 That’s a new company, right?

Marko Tarman 00:50:49 Yes, yes. So there are a few trying to compete, but I guess the maybe the the margins simply aren’t high enough for these companies to, to compete. Maybe they have better investment elsewhere. Elsewhere. I don’t know.

Vlad Costea 00:51:10 Nvidia for example, is responsible for maybe not single handedly, but running most of the AI infrastructure. And I’m surprised that they went all in on AI, but they haven’t made any moves in mining.

Marko Tarman 00:51:29 I mean, if you look back into the 20 1617 era, they sold a lot of GPU mining GPUs. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with, how is it called the P 106, P 104. Have you heard about these GPUs?

Vlad Costea 00:51:48 so those were RTX ones.

Marko Tarman 00:51:51 No no, no. Those were the mining specific GPUs. And that was the first boom of GPU mining, I think in 2017. at that time, I still had a computer, service in my hometown, and I was also selling, computer parts. and when I made my my first GPU mining farm, with about 600 GPUs We used the 104th, 104, which is, I think, if I remember correctly, the GTX 1070 equivalent. so those were GPU mining only. sorry. yeah. GPU mining only GPUs made by Nvidia. Later on, AMD attempted to follow this also, but they weren’t as successful. they had like the if 570 model, something like that for GPU mining.

Vlad Costea 00:52:56 It seems like 572 was quite popular.

Marko Tarman 00:53:02 500 what.

Vlad Costea 00:53:03 570 x two from. That was.

Marko Tarman 00:53:07 From MDS. Then the 580 or 70. Because at that point, if you would get a hold on any of these GPUs, you were happy because there simply wasn’t any GPUs. And I remember, we had, like a collective order with our clients, and we ordered like a couple hundred of GPUs, and Nvidia sold a lot of GPUs back at that point. Maybe one could also argue that this is actually what kickstarted the the GPU development in a way that Nvidia did later on. I bet they made a lot of money on it.

Vlad Costea 00:53:45 And they could be making A6, but they’re not.

Marko Tarman 00:53:50 That’s a good point. I guess their their focus is on GPU processor, not on an async process, or because that’s where they got the knowledge. You know, maybe the market is simply not big enough for them or maybe they don’t. Yeah, maybe they have the the main knowledge in GPU sector. By the way, there was also a CMP GPUs later on that was in the RTX 3080 era because the RTX 3080 had a lock on it.

Marko Tarman 00:54:21 Not sure if you heard about it. It was like a hash rate lock. where how is it called? It was LH like light hash rate or something like that, I forgot. And, this lock basically prevented the GPU to run at 100% when mining. Somehow the GPU Bios detected the the high memory usage on the GPU, which was the patterns looked like from the Ethereum mining. And they simply throttled the GPUs. And as a as like an alternative, they created a three MP GPUs which weren’t locked in such a way. And by the way, I was the first one to have the LHR unlock out there for all of the GPUs, which we are quite proud of.

Vlad Costea 00:55:17 Really cool. I’m looking at the Nvidia website. They seem to have the latest model is 98 from the CMP series. I guess this was discontinued after Ethereum switched from Proof of work to proof of shit, as you call it. But it’s pretty cool. I have some video gamer friends and they seem to hate mining as a whole because they they think that because of it.

Vlad Costea 00:55:50 And also they hate cryptocurrencies because they get this feeling that because of cryptocurrencies they can’t find affordable video cards anymore.

Marko Tarman 00:56:01 I mean, that was that’s a three years old story because right now the GPUs are quite cheap. If you look at if you try to look for 30, 70, 30, 80 GPU, which was the mine, which was the mining GPU. you could get it quite cheap. but yeah, in 2021, there was a big shortage of GPUs. And obviously, obviously a gamer would be, mad or angry at the miner. but then again, if they bother GPU, they can also mine with it. So a lot of my gamers were miners. that unfortunately, is just, how economy and capitalism works.

Vlad Costea 00:56:45 Yeah, I think there was a chip shortage all over the board in 2021 because of the pandemic. And I remember some people buying GPUs, playing video games with them for a year or two. I think they bought them in 2019 or something, and then they sold it in 2021 for the same price, if not more money.

Vlad Costea 00:57:04 Yeah.

Marko Tarman 00:57:06 Yeah. The the price of the GPUs went like they went through. It was really big. Spike. There was a lot of demand.

Vlad Costea 00:57:17 Nowadays, would you say that acquiring the most powerful gaming GPU, like the 1490? RTX is good for mining, or is it still capped in terms of hash rate?

Marko Tarman 00:57:33 the Nvidia later on removed the the cap for the lock. So right now all the GPUs, can be fully utilized for mining.

Vlad Costea 00:57:45 Which is pretty cool when you think about it. But once again, the gamers are gonna be angry.

Speaker 4 00:57:52 I mean.

Marko Tarman 00:57:54 Not no, not necessary because there’s no, no. And there’s no demand for mining with GPUs at the moment. No, but I don’t know anyone who would be buying additional GPUs to mine right now, at least not on a scale.

Vlad Costea 00:58:11 That’s interesting. So you’re saying there’s a decline in profitability for mining with GPUs?

Marko Tarman 00:58:18 Yes. Since it even went to proof of it.

Vlad Costea 00:58:22 So there are no more popular coins that you can mine with a GPU.

Marko Tarman 00:58:28 There are coins. They people are still mining, but they’re not investing. I would say they’re not investing so much in new equipment, at least not on a scale as there was in 2019 or 2021.

Vlad Costea 00:58:44 So, given this observation, how do you see the future of proof of work? How is it going to end up just large mining farms running Asics?

Speaker 4 00:58:55 yes.

Marko Tarman 00:58:56 Yes. This is, I think, the future because first of all, there’s no good projects that are run on GPU mineable algorithm. And another thing to note is that there isn’t really a GP only, GPU only mining algorithm, so all algorithms, majority of them can be mined with Asics. The question is, if there’s an ASIC manufacturer that’s willing to invest time and money into developing an async machine for the algorithm. Like even Ethereum was supposedly a GPU mining algorithm. So they’re Hashimoto or Hash, but there were Asics running on these algorithms. E9 I think, I think from Antminer is an AC that runs on, BTC or hash.

Vlad Costea 00:59:56 Yeah. They launched that very late. I think it was one year before the switch.

Marko Tarman 01:00:01 I think a bit more, but yeah, it was quite late. So my point here is that there is no such thing as ASIC resistant, or maybe a GPU only algorithm. There could be AC. how do you say algorithms that are harder for ASIC manufacturers to create async machines for? But every algorithm in theory, as far as I have talked with our developers, is, async. The question is just how much money there is and how much. How much the manufacturer wants to invest. so at the end of the day, yes, if, if a project or a coin becomes very, very popular, there might be a big interest to create an ASIC for it. Async machine.

Vlad Costea 01:00:59 I’m saying this became depressing pretty fast. I was gonna ask you, if you believe that there’s any future in home mining. Because there seems to be a new resurgence in hobbyist mining. You get these nerd miners, these big tax supers.

Vlad Costea 01:01:15 These firms are replacing their A6 with new generation ones. So there’s an opportunity for you. I think in one was it 2021 that China banned large scale mining? And a lot of these machines ended up on markets being bought second hand by hobbyist miners. And I think there will still be a market for this. But do you believe that people will keep on doing it, or are they just gonna give up because they’re not making too much money?

Marko Tarman 01:01:46 Let let me just correct you on the first question or like statement that is getting depressed. There’s still a lot of projects that are continuously working. The the the the Their project in order to stay. For example, CPU only mineable. for example, Monero is such such a coin that has maybe 5 or 7 different algorithms since its beginning, because they’re always evolving in order to keep the Asics out of the equation. So you had Kryptonite? algorithm Kryptonite v1, Kryptonite v2 there is random x, etc. so, all of these, there are still some coins, some projects that hate Asics.

Marko Tarman 01:02:41 so yeah, just I wanted to let this out. And the second question was about, can you remind.

Vlad Costea 01:02:51 Me hobbyist home mining, if you think it will become a phenomenon or it’s just a trend or a fad.

Speaker 4 01:03:00 Okay, so the hub.

Marko Tarman 01:03:03 If you look at the industry right now, we and we go to the ASIC mining, we have three different algorithms. So it’s a script and we have a hash. And if we compare them by the margin, the Bitcoin mining has the lowest margin in terms of efficiency. And like if you have a machine how much you’re going to earn then the script or Dogecoin. Litecoin is the is slightly there’s slightly more margin, slightly higher earnings and but there’s slightly more risks in terms of difficulty increasing very quickly. And the last one is Casper where the profits were higher maybe a year ago. The profits for Casper were really, really high. So with the machine you would be or you could be earning maybe $50 per day, but there’s higher risk. And it has proven true that the cost of mining right now is not as profitable as it was one year ago.

Marko Tarman 01:04:04 But Bitcoin mining profits are still relatively similar to what they were one year ago. I’m talking with one ASIC machine. So you always have this, let’s say levels of investments. And a retail hobbyist miner will be more inclined to invest in more, in machines that have higher, risks but also higher potential rewards. And you can see Casper miners is mostly done by smaller, smaller miners by, you know, people who have one machine, maybe they have a garage where they can connect a machine. There’s a lot of more these kind of miners on Casper, but you don’t get as many miners on similar miners with Bitcoin basics because the margins are simply too low. Of course they are such miners, but they might be hosting with hosting facilities, etc..

Vlad Costea 01:05:10 I have two more questions that come to mind about Nice hash. But before that, let me tell the audience about two other sponsors. They are trying to build the future of Bitcoin. One of them is layer two labs that’s trying to build merged mind sidechains.

Vlad Costea 01:05:26 And if they become successful and they activate Bip 300, you’re going to have a sidechain for pretty much every use case that’s out there. There will be a sidechain for Ethereum. There will be a sidechain for prediction markets. There will be one for privacy with Zcash cryptography. There will be one for scaling with very large blocks that get pruned every few months. And you can actually test that it’s on the Bitcoin testnet, and you can download the software on your computer at layer two labs download. And I think it’s available for every operating system out there. It’s interesting. And it can also solve the security budget problem in Bitcoin because there’s uncertainty. If there’s going to be enough fees to make up for the diminishing revenue. There’s also Citra, which is trying to build this zero knowledge roll up on Bitcoin. They’re sort of like arbitrary on Ethereum in the sense that they want to bring a suit of not a suit, a suite of applications that are not available on Bitcoin. I believe their endgame is to make WBTC, which is wrapped Bitcoin that you have today on Ethereum.

Vlad Costea 01:06:40 That’s custody by BitGo. More trust minimized so that you can have these financial services where you get stablecoins against your Bitcoin in a way that is much more cypherpunk. Than having custodians in the middle. And Syria today has this software that you can test on the Bitcoin Signet. You can find it on Syria that x, y, z that city x, y, z. And you can give it a try. And these two can actually represent the future of Bitcoin. Thank you for setting for my ads. And now the question about nice hash. I see that you guys also have this payment processing feature or service that you added to your website. I remember paying with bitcoin at the bar at the hotel in Maribor and it was the same terminal, the same user experience. I was disappointed after the conference because I stayed an extra day that they did not keep it. I asked if I can still pay in bitcoin and they said no, we we only had that during the conference. And what is this and how is it different from something like BTC pay or Lipa or some other services out there.

Marko Tarman 01:07:52 It’s quite similar. Actually, we have our lightning node, which is, by the way, one of the biggest and oldest, lightning nodes. We’ve started it, I think in 2009 19, the node. And then after a couple of years of growing it just organically, we decided that it might be a good solution to offer Bitcoin payment payments through lightning, for, you know, for our clients.

Speaker 4 01:08:22 You know.

Marko Tarman 01:08:23 Or even as a payment solution, on the conference, at the whole conference was, the whole hotel was there was an option to pay with, with bitcoin, with lightning through our app, through wallet of Satoshi, however we wanted. And there was actually a lot of bars around the town around Maryborough, where you could pay with Bitcoin. I think about 20 20 bars offered bitcoin, payments. But unfortunately lately we’re seeing a lot of regulation issues. The mica, the travel rules, especially because we cannot develop it as much as we would want. So we’re putting a small hold on the development here.

Vlad Costea 01:09:16 Small hold on the development of what more exactly the node or nice hash pay.

Marko Tarman 01:09:22 The nice cash pay the node is running normally our users can still use it. but the payment or of goods might be a problem because it’s hard to determine where the funds come from. And because of the travel rule, we have to know where the funds come from and where they go. Simple as that. And this is a problem for all. Actually, for all of the bitcoin, payment processors.

Vlad Costea 01:09:52 Yeah, that’s sort of insane because on the Lightning Network, you have pretty good sender privacy. You don’t know where the funds come from, and there is no public ledger to reveal exactly where it comes from.

Marko Tarman 01:10:06 That’s the issue. Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:10:08 So no, that’s the feature. It’s not an issue.

Marko Tarman 01:10:12 No, no. Yeah. It’s not it’s not a software related issue. It’s more like a legal or regulation compliance related, issue. But we’re still we’re still keeping an eye on it. We’re we’re finding ways to offer it to more people, to more merchants, etc..

Marko Tarman 01:10:33 It’s not a problem if there’s an Irish user that wants to pay through it because it’s inside the platform. but as soon as something else comes, some someone tries to tries to pay from other, wallet provider for example wallet for Satoshi, then that’s an issue from a compliance or regulatory perspective.

Vlad Costea 01:10:55 I see that your lightning node has 1072 channels, and 888 808 nodes are connected to it with a node capacity of 151 Bitcoin, which is quite impressive. I think that’s like what in US dollars.

Marko Tarman 01:11:17 Oh, that’s that’s quite a lot.

Vlad Costea 01:11:21 I think one Bitcoin today is $80,000. So 100 is $8 million. And then you know it’s a lot of money.

Marko Tarman 01:11:32 Yeah it’s a lot of money.

Vlad Costea 01:11:33 You have to secure it very well.

Marko Tarman 01:11:37 it’s one of the oldest. I think actually if you Saw them by the the when the channel when the node was created. It’s definitely the the oldest and the biggest. But, we’ve made payments worth more than one and a half built bitcoins through the lightning, node. So yeah, it’s, it’s definitely something that we are working on a lot.

Marko Tarman 01:12:03 And we actually, I love I love all of our miners to get payouts in lightning. So even small miners, can get paid every four hours. maybe just to satoshis if they want.

Vlad Costea 01:12:17 That was gonna be my follow up question, because sometimes the rewards are so small that one on chain transaction basically takes up more most of what the miner has earned. Yeah. And especially in times of high demand, when fees are like $20 or more, it can be very inconvenient for the user. Yeah. And you can either use a blockchain that has low fees like Litecoin or something. But I’m not sure if the user wants that or I guess you you have been using the Lightning Network for this.

Marko Tarman 01:12:55 So nice. If you only have Bitcoin withdrawals at the moment, we’ve had before we’ve had Litecoin, Ethereum and all other coins when at the time we still had an exchange. but yeah, you can withdraw through lightning, without them pretty much for free. and because the node is so well connected, you can pretty much send it anywhere.

Marko Tarman 01:13:17 There is no issues. You know, all of the biggest exchanges are connected. Binance, Kraken. Everyone is connected to each node. And a lot of times they actually asked us for some assistance etc..

Vlad Costea 01:13:31 It’s pretty interesting.

Marko Tarman 01:13:33 But by the way, I’m quite proud that Nicea was the first one that offered miners bitcoin payouts in writing. So we were the first one there also.

Vlad Costea 01:13:44 So this was before ocean mining?

Marko Tarman 01:13:48 yeah. That was I think about a year or a year and a half ago.

Vlad Costea 01:13:54 Yeah. Not so long ago they launched and they claimed to be innovative, but it seems like Nice Hash has been doing it way before.

Marko Tarman 01:14:04 Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:14:05 But you guys don’t get as much credit. Like, I don’t hear people praising you and saying, you know, these guys are innovators and they have been doing this.

Marko Tarman 01:14:14 You know, maybe, you know, how is there any Europeans are or maybe like, in that part of Europe that that part of the world, we don’t we aren’t as an American who push themselves out, you know, as much like you would say, an American company, doing and saying a lot of good things about itself and about what they accomplished.

Marko Tarman 01:14:42 Maybe that’s just something that it’s not natural to us. Maybe you can relate. but yeah, like we’ve been ahead of our ahead of time for ten years. The marketplace is ahead of time. It’s still ahead of time. and there’s, like, a lot of stuff that you can do with hashrate, marketplace commoditization of the hash rate, etc. and, yeah, Max has been very, innovative throughout these years. Like I said, we’re a software company. We’re still a development company in our core principle.

Vlad Costea 01:15:21 the only other hash rate company that I’m aware of is called lumen. I’ve interviewed the guy behind it, Ryan Condren, but it’s very different in its business model because it’s built on, I think arbitrary and like on Ethereum, and it has its own token and very different.

Marko Tarman 01:15:44 What Ryan did is, is very great. he what he was able to build was astonishing. but there’s a few differences between ISIS and what they offer. First of all, the last time I used it, which was, I think more than a year ago.

Marko Tarman 01:16:02 So maybe there’s a lot of different stuff now. you had to set up your own proxy to receive the hash rate or to buy the hash rate, which is quite inconvenient. you had to buy the hash rate from a single buyer. Seller. Sorry, which was not as interactive or so simple as it is on ISIS. You simply set up the pull address where you want to set the hash rate, you set how much bitcoins you want to spend, what’s the price you’re willing to offer how much you want and press a button and you get the hash rate if the price is high enough. You know, that’s the biggest difference. It’s nice. It’s really, simplified. Simple commodity marketplace.

Vlad Costea 01:16:51 Yeah. And I see some statistics on your website. It seems like you have mined 169 Bitcoin blocks. And I think it’s a very beautiful number, 169. Really nice.

Marko Tarman 01:17:05 we haven’t mined any blocks. I’m not sure where you got that info. Maybe there is a difference. Oh, you’re probably looking.

Vlad Costea 01:17:11 At.

Marko Tarman 01:17:11 Mine. Yeah. Easy mining. That’s a different product. Yeah. So easy mining is built on top of the marketplace. And easy mining allows everyone to buy hash rate with the click of a button. You know, you could get, from the top of my head. You can buy a hash of hash rate For an hour with $5, or maybe one bit of hash for an hour for $5. And in that time, you’re solo mining, your hash rate. You’re actually owner of the hash rate for that hour. And if your hash rate confirms a block on our solo pool, which is closed for the public, if you confirm a block, you will get the whole block reward. So these are the blocks confirmed. So you would probably see Raven Coin, Casper Lite coin and Dogecoin and Bitcoin. So these are the the the coins for which you can buy the hash rate with a click of a button. Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:18:15 Yeah. You’re very right.

Marko Tarman 01:18:17 Yeah. Because this is not a mining.

Marko Tarman 01:18:21 It’s more than a mining pool. it’s it’s a marketplace for hash rate. And buyers are the ones that are competing or confirming the blocks on the blockchain. It’s not nice and not sellers of hashing. Technically speaking, the buyers of hashrate are the miners from the pool’s perspective or from the blockchain perspective.

Vlad Costea 01:18:45 That’s an interesting thought. The buyers of the hash rate are the miners.

Marko Tarman 01:18:51 Yes, because they are the legitimate, legitimate owners of that hash rate, because they bought the compute power, they bought the commodity. And it’s a short lived commodity. It only exists in a fraction of a second, and they own it in that time. But if their hash rate confirms the block, they get the reward from the blockchain or from the pool. Depends either solar mining or poor mining.

Vlad Costea 01:19:25 Who is usually most interested in purchasing hash rate. Like why would anyone want to do this? Is it just to prop up their coin to make it look good for a certain amount of time? Is it because they think the time is right to mine at that point, because the difficulty went down or something?

Marko Tarman 01:19:46 There’s different.

Marko Tarman 01:19:47 There’s a lot of reasons. Different reasons. let me just try to explain the most the ones that make the most sense. So obviously there’s arbitrage, arbitrage traders, buyers who are doing arbitrage trading with the hash rate. Because it’s a marketplace, you can buy the hash rate at a lower price than what the hash price is, what the full pay rate from the pool is. So let’s say that the pool pay rate is, $50 per hash per day. So that’s the unit of price or hash rate. And you can buy the same amount. You can buy one better hash or one extra hash or nice fish for 48. Better hash for, 4048 bitcoins per Peter. Hash per day. So you’re making 4% on this trade. and if you, if you buy the hash rate or nice hash and sell it on a pool, because theoretically the pool is buying the hash rate, in order to liquidate it on a blockchain. you’re making 4% on that trade. Of course, deducting the fees, etc. maybe at the end of the day you’re making one 8% from trading that hash rate.

Marko Tarman 01:21:05 So these are the arbitrage buyers. They they are actually buying all the available hash rate in the marketplace that there is if it’s priced under the hash price. And this is like one of the unique, unique things of nice hash is that if there’s at least two buyers to big enough buyers, they will always compete for the hash rate until they reach a break even price. And that’s the first type of buyers. The second type of buyers would be solo miners. Let’s say that I want I’m thinking about buying a bit to do some lottery mining, or if I want to buy the, the hash rate, I can buy hash rate for $5, get ten per hash for for a couple of hours, or maybe one better hash for a couple of hours and have decently high enough chances or probability, sorry probability to confirm a block. And these are solo miners, solo buyers who are buying the hash rate in order to have, a probability of hitting a block. Right. And these guys must outbid the arbitrage buyers in order to get the hash rate.

Marko Tarman 01:22:25 Otherwise they aren’t getting the hash rate, so they will have to pay 51 bitcoins for, sorry, bitcoins dollars per hash per day in order to outbid the arbitrage buyers. And in that point, you have, a demand that’s willing to pay more than what the blockchain is willing is paying out a mining pool. So that’s that human factor that’s only available through marketplaces. Then you can also have, a mining pool, a mining pool mined by the hash rate in order to increase their luck, or maybe in order to stress test their, their servers. Maybe there’s, an insurance or, you know, if for hosting providers insurance in terms of buying the hash rate is viable because if they have a contract to provide 59% uptime of their clients machines and they the hash rate drops, the uptime drops to, let’s say 94%, they can just buy the additional hash rate in order to compensate the the amount of hash that’s missing for the client. And they will not be get fined. they will not get fined from the because maybe they have that in the contract or whatever.

Marko Tarman 01:23:49 So it’s also a way of securing or insuring the the mining for hosting.

Speaker 5 01:24:01 So these are just a couple of examples.

Vlad Costea 01:24:05 I guess the most popular one that comes into popular culture is to just acquire a lot of hash rate to get that 51% share. So that’s why I asked you. Because there are all of these business use cases which are not the most obvious.

Marko Tarman 01:24:26 Yes there is. Like, the buyers of hash rate are really smart people. Most the ones that I have had a chance to meet, are mathematical. They. You know how to turn around numbers. They are also aware that FX pulls, some of the FX pulls, are not. How should I frame it? might not have the most legit payouts. So they find out that if they do their own mining pool, they might get better payouts if they have enough hash rate. and those are the guys that are willing to pay more than what the other buyers are.

Vlad Costea 01:25:13 Is there any competition for nice hash. Really? Because it seems like you have a pretty unique business here.

Vlad Costea 01:25:20 And if you don’t have a lot of competition, the next question is why?

Marko Tarman 01:25:28 nice Fish is a very, very technically advanced product. and I’m quite certain that it’s way more complicated than any exchange, you know, and any other mining pool that, you know, Regarding competition, there is no direct competition that I’m aware of. And I think the reason for this is because I know a couple of guys that have tried, but it’s not as simple as starting a mining pool. You know, with the mining pool, you simply have to set up a node that communicates with the blockchain, give out other miners your IP address, count their shares, and based on these shares, give them out the payout. Do an accounting for some or. I’m oversimplifying things, but, Nice. This type of service is way more complicated. and yeah, I think that’s one of the main reasons why there is no direct competition that I’m aware of.

Vlad Costea 01:26:39 So the reason why is the complexity of running this type of business.

Speaker 5 01:26:47 Yes.

Marko Tarman 01:26:47 Technical complexities.

Vlad Costea 01:26:50 Okay. Is there anything that nice hash can also do that we haven’t talked about?

Marko Tarman 01:27:01 Are we talking about mining. Right.

Vlad Costea 01:27:03 Mining or some other services like the payments processor that we talked about but seems like it’s on hold.

Marko Tarman 01:27:11 We? We have a lot of products. obviously the core product has been. And I think it will always be the marketplace. It’s the product that has been ahead of its time for ten years. Like it’s the same identical product from ten years ago. and there are other products like you mentioned is mining, which allows buyers to buy packages of hash rate and start solar mining with a couple of clicks without owning any hardware. there’s the the GPU mining things that we did, which was quite impressive. There was the exchange that we unfortunately shut down. and there’s future product projects, products, products that I’m not sure if I can talk about yet, but I think it’s the next step in the mining industry, like generally speaking, globally speaking, I think that’s the next logical step, in mining.

Marko Tarman 01:28:20 But there’s a couple of couple months more until we can talk more about that.

Vlad Costea 01:28:25 Oh, you’re making me wish I waited, like a couple of months more to have exclusivity on the news.

Marko Tarman 01:28:32 We can still do it later on.

Vlad Costea 01:28:34 Sure. Yes. Let me plug the last two sponsors. And they’re not last. It just happens that the order was like this. And then I’m gonna ask you about the future of mining and the future of nice hash. So no one’s dot com is a platform where you can trade just like a nice hash in a peer to peer fashion. You can exchange gift cards, you can exchange a lot of stuff that you find useful. And most of the customers are from the Global South and the CEO of No One’s There. Youssef is very passionate about empowering Africa and the Middle East. And he talks about this scheme that he made where there’s a percentage for every middle man along the way, because he says that everyone gets a seat at the table and everyone eats. And they also have a spot market where you can trade your coins.

Vlad Costea 01:29:26 And also they have a debit card that you can use for spending your coins if you’re into that. But their main businesses with these gift cards and swapping coins in this peer to peer market and it’s very popular in Nigeria as far as I’m aware. And you can check it out on no one’s. It’s basically the cooler and a bit more decentralized version of Paxful because they used to work at Paxful, he was a co-founder, and now he wants to do something that is more aligned with his values. And last but not least, I gotta tell you about Hollinger, which is a business that’s based in Switzerland, and they’re trying to help you with your self-custody. So if you have a lot of Bitcoin and you’re afraid of keeping your keys in the house because you might get rent attacked by someone, or you’re part of a company that’s starting to buy bitcoin and you don’t know how to set up a quorum of keys so that the CTO will not basically spend everyone’s coins. You can reach out to these guys that are based in Switzerland.

Vlad Costea 01:30:37 They will offer you much better privacy than other businesses, and they will teach you the principles of good security, whether or not you need a hardware wallet, whether or not you should set up a multi-sig, what type of multi-sig, and so on. So check them out on HODLing. And now, Marco, tell me more about the future of Nice Hash because you have had the ten year anniversary. There was a big party You had basically a conference that was thrown around this party. And what’s next?

Marko Tarman 01:31:16 are we talking about niceness or mining in general?

Vlad Costea 01:31:20 I guess both of them. I started with nice hash. But then I’m also gonna ask you about trends in mining that you see that emerge.

Speaker 5 01:31:26 Yeah.

Marko Tarman 01:31:27 Nice. Hash has moved our headquarters to Switzerland. before we were based in British Virgin Islands and operating from British Virgin Islands. Might not build a lot of trust among the users, the potential users that we’re trying to target. and we have become very strict with compliance with KYC people with a mandatory KYC and.

Marko Tarman 01:32:04 This, I believe, will be the future of Nightwish and also the future of the whole mining industry. We are observing that the majority of real miners throughout the world. I’m talking about bigger companies that operate serious hash rate, will have to follow or we’ll be looking for hash rate destinations that are audited, that are compliant and that that can suit these kind of players, these big institutional miners or just big companies, let’s say, not necessarily necessary publicly traded companies. That’s that’s the reason why that’s one of the reasons why we have moved our Headquarters to Switzerland. and yeah, unfortunately, because Ethereum went to. To proof of shit, we have to change our priorities, change our focus, and adapt in order to survive. Maybe in order to survive is not the correct word, but in order to grow even more so, we had the future of mining. Also, I think, lies in regulation. That might not sound, a lot cypherpunk ish. I understand that. But again, as we discussed throughout this, podcast, Bitcoin mining, especially bitcoin mining has become an a business, profit oriented business.

Marko Tarman 01:33:57 It’s not one CPU, one, one vote anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. And, yeah, I think, this is this kind of future has a lot of potential. I mean, a lot of a big. There’s a big chance that this is the future of Bitcoin mining regulation. I mean.

Vlad Costea 01:34:25 Well, in terms of one CPU, one vote. Are there any projects that you’re following and are aligned with that that you like?

Marko Tarman 01:34:37 I’ve been following stratum V2. Again, the biggest issue with stratum v2 is that it doesn’t bring any additional, benefits to the miners or to the pool operators. It’s just an additional value to Cypherpunks Banks are a bit like Bitcoin maxes. Maybe I’m not using the correct terms, but what I’m trying to say is that if the miners don’t have any monetary benefit, they are less likely to adopt something that’s not, that’s not going to benefit them. Again, I’m generalizing a lot of miners, not all miners are the same, but in my opinion, a lot of bitcoin miners are running Bitcoin mining facilities as a business, not as a support system for Bitcoin.

Vlad Costea 01:35:34 Which sort of sucks. But at the same time, you know, it’s a business. You can’t blame them. They invested a lot of money. They have skin in the game. You can’t blame them for running their business in a certain way.

Marko Tarman 01:35:49 That’s correct. And, nobody has all the Answers. Neither do I. Unfortunately, the reality is that there’s a lot of Bitcoin miners that are strictly profit orientated, and I don’t have a solution. I’m just stating out facts.

Vlad Costea 01:36:11 Is it possible for these nation states that amass a large percentage of a hash rate to order these private companies that own the hash rate to coordinate attacks, for example? I remember Peter Todd being especially concerned about what’s the name of the big mining pool foundry from USA, because all the miners are owned by the same company. It’s not a pool in the sense that you have lots of participants.

Marko Tarman 01:36:45 As far as I am familiar with foundry situation. they they are part of NY, the IG, the AI, company, which is like an investor company.

Marko Tarman 01:37:02 and yes, a lot of funding for miners, for mining companies, supposedly, comes from that direction. And that’s also a reason why foundry was able to grow so much. supposedly, again, I don’t I haven’t fact checked this, but yeah, the foundry is definitely the biggest player in that sense. And, who knows who is truly behind it, who is truly running, you know, pulling the shots. And, and.

Vlad Costea 01:37:39 It’s funny because when most of the proof of work mining, especially the ASIC one, was happening in China, there wasn’t so much talk about regulation, it was much more of a free market, even though China does not really like free markets. And now that a lot of the mining is happening in the US, we talk much more about regulating what the miners are doing. We talk more about maybe censoring some transactions in some mining circles, using go fake lists or whatever to blacklist some utx shows. I’m not trying to get you to make some sort of unpopular comment, but it’s just an observation that mining was better off when it was mostly happening in China.

Marko Tarman 01:38:31 I think it’s not maybe related to the fact that it was in China, but to the fact that it hasn’t evolved so much at that time. if you if you understand what I’m trying to say, that at that point, mining was still not as involved evolved, evolved as it is now. So before it was still more of a hobbyist kind of thing. Not entirely hobbyist, but there was still like it just this industry just started to take some steps at that point. And those were the first steps. And I think since since four years ago, the Bitcoin mining is a completely different game. I think that’s the that’s the blame instead of the where the hashrate is located.

Vlad Costea 01:39:20 Is there any trend in the world of mining that gives you hope and makes you feel like, you know, maybe that the days of freedom and just mining from your bedroom are not over yet?

Marko Tarman 01:39:39 That’s a good and a thought. Another hard question at the same time. So You’re asking me what projects could be good for coal mining? Or like what? Some.

Vlad Costea 01:39:53 Something that you like and gives you some hope, you know, for the future that it will not just be these large farms that are massively regulated, and it’s up to the nation states to decide the future of the security of these networks.

Marko Tarman 01:40:11 Maybe if I take a different approach, which is a bit philosophical and, you know, there throughout the history there was different products, where its development wasn’t the final stage. As we know, the steam engine was, I think, the first, engine with internal combustion. it wasn’t the last stage of, let’s say, See trains. And there there was new technologies that were developed later on for making the train move. you’ve got digital locomotives, you’ve got electric locomotives now, and maybe the next one will be hydro powered locomotives. So maybe it’s the same thing for proof of work. I don’t know. I’m just saying that maybe there will be something that’s even better than proof of work in the future to make to prevent a double spend. And that’s definitely not proof of stake.

Vlad Costea 01:41:30 I see some projects taking a hybrid approach where they have proof of work and proof of stake at the same time. I’ve seen some experiments with what what was it called, proof of authority and stuff like this. But I haven’t seen. I guess it might be because of the VCs funding these projects that there isn’t much innovation being funded. There is. You can find research papers that get published from people who think of better ways, but they don’t really get funding, because if it’s proof of work, it’s obvious for the investors that they should invest in infrastructure and make money off of mining. If it’s proof of stake, it’s obvious for them that they just buy a large amount of tokens and they stick them and they keep earning rewards for something else. It’s not that obvious for them to figure out.

Marko Tarman 01:42:27 Yes, it’s it’s hard to say. Maybe the proof of work is the best way. Who knows? but yeah, there were definitely a lot of attempts to make, consensus mechanism better. Or like, different consensus mechanism.

Marko Tarman 01:42:43 you also had, if you remember, something like proof of storage, that kind of, mechanisms. But I think proof of work was still like the, the best way. Yeah. I don’t know, maybe there was just simple wasn’t simply wasn’t enough funding in that direction because regarding these projects that have proof of usefulness, etc., I think they make the algorithm first or the proof of whatever first, and they then they get the funding because that’s the way of getting the funding. you know, maybe it should be the opposite. Yeah.

Vlad Costea 01:43:27 There are some people who think that Bitcoin will live and die with Sha256. Do you think that’s the case that Bitcoin is forever stuck with Sha256? Or do you believe that in the future, something much more efficient will come along and it will shift the entire industry?

Marko Tarman 01:43:47 But if if you think about, maybe you’re targeting quantum computers here, but. Even if the quantum computers can crack or when or even, I don’t know, can crack the Sha 256, that’s definitely going to be definitely going to be a point where Bitcoin will fork to something else.

Marko Tarman 01:44:17 I think that’s the only, let’s say reasonable. Or probable event that might happen in order to get the Bitcoin off Sha 256.

Vlad Costea 01:44:33 If I understand correctly, the threat for or the threat from quantum computers comes in terms of attacking the signature system, which is ecdsa. And cracking that one to basically guess or brute force. Private keys from public keys.

Speaker 5 01:44:53 And.

Marko Tarman 01:44:54 Also the blockchain. You can also reverse rewrite the blocks from the unlock block 500. If if a miner a quantum mining computer starts making the blockchain from block, you know, 800,000 and they can outrun the normal miners, then that will be the longest chain. And that chain will be the correct one. Even if there was the the blocks were empty.

Vlad Costea 01:45:30 Yeah, that’s an interesting thought to have. And it’s going to massively disrupts what’s going on with miners. So yeah, I guess we should expect in a decade or two to switch to something else.

Marko Tarman 01:45:46 I wouldn’t be paranoid about this, because if there there will be a quantum computer that can, that can crack the Sha256 encryption.

Marko Tarman 01:46:04 There will also be, you know, military uses encryption for communication all the time. And I think they will be the ones that will find a way to hide their communication from quantum computers first. And that’s the same. That same, let’s say principle or mechanism could be probably used on Bitcoin. But yeah, I’m not I’m not an expert in quantum computers to say any more smart stuff around it.

Vlad Costea 01:46:38 Also, it’s pretty philosophical because you have to imagine a world where all of these assumptions are destroyed. All of the miners for Sha256 become basically paperweights or door holders or something, and then you have to start from scratch and figure out a way for Bitcoin to survive. I think Paul Pugh from Edge Wallet said something along the lines of Bitcoin is mostly the 21 million coins and we can have them on any network ever. It doesn’t have to be the current one. It can be any other one if we discover something better. What’s important is that the holders are maintained, and I’m not sure if I 100% agree because there are some benefits to using the Bitcoin network unless we figure out something so much better than this?

Marko Tarman 01:47:33 Yes.

Marko Tarman 01:47:34 And that’s that. Then we get back to the the discussion we had before. Maybe proof of work is not the best or the final technological advancement we have in order to prevent double spend.

Vlad Costea 01:47:50 But if proof of work doesn’t turn out to be, the future is nice hash ready to adapt to that?

Marko Tarman 01:47:57 That’s the far, far ahead. And probably not something that I could answer, but who knows what the future holds.

Vlad Costea 01:48:06 How come nice has never offered staking pools?

Marko Tarman 01:48:11 Because we’re we’re in majority a mining company or a mining development company or something like that. And.

Vlad Costea 01:48:23 And I guess you could do something similar with staking or not. I don’t know.

Marko Tarman 01:48:30 You know. You know, there’s obviously a lot of companies have been looking into ways to offer staking, but I guess it’s not as simple as that. And, yeah, I prefer not to like, talk about, talk about this.

Vlad Costea 01:48:50 I’ve asked you about the future of mining. I’ve asked you about the future of Nice Hash. But what’s next for you, Marco?

Marko Tarman 01:49:02 From a business perspective, definitely help grow.

Marko Tarman 01:49:06 Nice customer. get nice cash, even more recognition, get nice hash, even more hash rate. And, help the company grow.

Vlad Costea 01:49:18 And spread the merchandise around. I see people in airports sometimes with nice hash hats or t shirts, and I tell them, nice t tee shirt.

Marko Tarman 01:49:29 Yeah. That’s, that’s when you get if you give much away on on the boot. But yeah, I’m happy to hear when people say that they saw, nice merch. And I am oftentimes approached by people whenever I’m wearing this, this kind of t shirt. they said in Slovenia, actually, they work for nice. I know this company. I’ve been using it, and like when we were in Miami for the first year in 2022, it was so fun. We went to a dinner. When we came out, there was like, guys passing us, hey, nice. Hey. What’s up? and, you know, it kind of gives you a feeling of what nice actually is and what it has achieved through, throughout these ten years, we’ve had millions of users.

Marko Tarman 01:50:18 And I guess this this can be seen throughout the when you’re walking on the street, actually.

Vlad Costea 01:50:28 Millions of users and many of them are walking on the street. I was gonna ask you, are you giving merchandise as a gift to some of the users when they achieve certain milestones? Like for being around for a long time or for offering a large amount of hash rate?

Marko Tarman 01:50:49 Not much. We don’t give out merch because I think big miners don’t want merch. They want lower fees on the pool. Let’s say a nice hash. but we had a shop where we where people could buy the merch, and we also give it out on, on most of the conferences that we go to. We just, you know, give out the merch. And because there’s so many people at these conferences, there’s a lot of t shirts that’s getting, given away.

Vlad Costea 01:51:23 And they’re nice and nerdy because they’re not like a Bitcoin t shirt where it says Bitcoin and people recognize what it is. It’s nice hash. So unless you are very deep into bitcoin and you understand mining and you have some knowledge about it, you’re not gonna get it.

Marko Tarman 01:51:40 It’s kind of abstract. At the same time, it’s you know, we’ve been joking about a lot because nice hash. And we were on the conference in Amsterdam at the time. I had a presentation about hashing. So I titled the presentation Amsterdam Hashing. and, people who understood the joke, were like quite impressed because nice hashing, which kind of means smoking pot or hash. that was the direction we were where we tried to make it a little bit more funny.

Vlad Costea 01:52:15 you send people to the coffee shop.

Marko Tarman 01:52:18 With nice hash.

Vlad Costea 01:52:23 Nice. I’m not sure if I have any more questions for you at this time. Marco, is there anything that you wanted me to ask you about, but I haven’t.

Marko Tarman 01:52:34 no. I think we pretty much covered everything.

Vlad Costea 01:52:39 Where can people follow you? A nice hash.

Marko Tarman 01:52:41 Maybe. Just a disclaimer that, most of these thoughts are my personal ones, so most of these shouldn’t be related to the company. Yeah. Very important. Yeah. Very important. so people can find me on LinkedIn, but, with my name, they can find me on Twitter or X as it is now.

Marko Tarman 01:53:07 and those are pretty much the most important, ways of reaching out to me. Then I’m also available on telegram. but, yeah, these are the.

Vlad Costea 01:53:16 Ways. Quite responsive. I’m impressed. We set this interview up in a very short amount of time with minimal interactions.

Marko Tarman 01:53:26 Yeah, I mean, the whole company, the way how we operate. We’re trying to be agile. So I guess, the sooner we did this, the sooner we can move on with other stuff.

Vlad Costea 01:53:39 Right. So there is something extra that we wanted to say and we forgot. And we’re adding this segment to the podcast. Marco, what is it that Nick Nice Hash has just announced?

Marko Tarman 01:53:50 Yes. We announced a partnership with M2. for me, the list. Most of people should already know the M2 company and they are often offering loans for especially for especially for miners. And, the loan can be backed by bitcoins, but it could be repaid, in a flexible, more flexible way, including hash rate. So that’s how NASA partnered with M2, where the loan for the first time, I am aware, can be repaid by hash rate directly.

Vlad Costea 01:54:34 So hash rate is the new Bitcoin. You don’t never sell your hash rate. Borrow against it.

Speaker 6 01:54:42 Yes. Yes.

Vlad Costea 01:54:44 Crazy.

Marko Tarman 01:54:44 And that’s that’s something, very big. Especially for, for miners.

Vlad Costea 01:54:53 But it’s not like you can hold the hash rate, right? You got to deploy it. You got to use it, and it happens one second after the other.

Marko Tarman 01:55:03 Yeah, sure. Hash rate is a short term commodity. Short lived commodity. And, you’re basically using the hash rate to repay the loan.

Vlad Costea 01:55:15 I found the announcement. It’s on Business Insider also. And two partners with nice hash to bring crypto lending solutions to miners worldwide. Let me also put it on the screen. I haven’t heard of them two. By the way, I don’t know what they do exactly or where they’re based. I gotta look into it.

Marko Tarman 01:55:38 Yeah, look into it. It’s, quite big company. I like one of the core features or products is the exchange. But as you can see, they’re offering loans.

Vlad Costea 01:55:54 Yeah. It says right here by Collateralize. Their BTC miners can now access convenient USDt loans, enabling them to scale their operations, cover expenses, and optimize profitability without selling their valuable assets. Man, this is a game changer.

Marko Tarman 01:56:11 It is. And this is just the first step.

Vlad Costea 01:56:15 For a long time it was like this. Miners had to sell some of their coins to be able to pay their expenses. Now they can hodl much more.

Marko Tarman 01:56:25 Yes, and they can loan against. They can a loan. Get a loan against their funds. And repay it with a portion of their hashrate, so they can decide how much hashrate they want to use to repay the loan. The more hashrate they use, the more the higher share of the the hash rate they use to repay the loan, the faster they will repay it. But they will be left with less, less, income, let’s say less balance.

Vlad Costea 01:56:59 Really great. I’m happy that we recorded this extra segment because it’s worth a mention.

Marko Tarman 01:57:05 Definitely.

Marko Tarman 01:57:07 Thank you.