Intro: You are listening to the Crypto Core Podcast, exploring the fascinating world of cryptocurrency with your hosts Blake and Brandon De Shaw. Please visit us as www.cryptocorelabs.com.
Blake: Hello and welcome back to the show. So today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about kind of the needs right now in the crypto and the block chain industry. Kind of how we’re doing this podcast is answering our own questions, exploring the field, and kind of taking you the audience with us. Welcome, Brandon.
Brandon: Yeah, hey Blake. So we are, I would call us enterprising entrepreneurs in this space, cryptocurrency, block chain, etc. And we are focusing not just on doing some mining ourselves and maybe some trading off of coins and tokens to probably make some money doing that in investing. But we’re also kind of building the shop, if you will, to create our own picks and shovels, because as you know, it’s always said, “Hey in the Gold Rush, the guys that went to mine the gold made a little bit of money, but the guys who made and sold the picks and shovels they did really well.” And so we’re trying to build our own picks and shovels here in this industry as well, and we’re going to kind of open up the doors to the shop if you will. And let people in to come in, and take a look and see what we’re doing, and see what maybe you guys want to do with it in your own way so that everybody can do well in this big change that’s going on with cryptocurrency and block chain. Because we truly believe that this is going to be a massive transfer of wealth in the world. And I don’t know if it will be the biggest ever, but it sure could because everybody uses currency every single day. And if there’s a new way of doing currency exchange for things of value, then I think it could be an enormous transfer of wealth. And so we want to open the shop up, if you will, we want to talk shop with you, and we want to figure out some ways we can be of value and of service in this industry and be rewarded for that.
Blake: And looking back in history, the Roman used to change currencies almost every other decade, and we’ve been on the gold and US dollar standard for so long that I think with technology which will we see changes things, is that I think we’re going to witness an evolution in the currency industry. I guess we can start off maybe talking about miners.
Brandon: Yeah, Blake. Tell them what we think we’re going to do with build miners here.
Blake: So right now, the mining industry is quite, if what we’re seeing here on January 15th, I guarantee you there’s a lot of disappointed boys and girls who saved up their Christmas money to build a computer, and went to Amazon or NewWave.com, and every high-end GPU unit is sold out.
Brandon: What’s a GPU unit?
Blake: So it’s a Graphic Processing Unit. So right when cryptocurrencies, I understand it began, people were just using CPUs to mine. As more and more people begin mining, that became inefficient and people switched to Graphic Processing Units because they can process how many millions a second. And so now you’re seeing machines built rather than doing 4K gaming, high HD gaming is that they’re using 6 sometimes 12 GPU units to actually mine the currency itself.
Brandon: Yeah. There’s, if I can here, I’m going to draw parallel to old school mining and it just so happens that we’re recording this interview in one of the big mining, historical mining places in the world which is Butte, Montana. And when you start mining, the miners, the first come they find gold nuggets and silver nuggets basically just laying out in plain sight, so it’s really easy. You pick that up stuff, or get some of the dust out of the creek, and you build a little apparatus to go through the ore, and you collect the really easy-to-get stuff. And that’s what some of these miners are doing at the beginning of cryptocurrency boom as they had just regular old computers, and they could solve the math problems that let you get rewarded the coins. But later on, after some of all that low-hanging fruit and easy picking metal gets taken, then you have to go to bigger and bigger equipment, you have to send guys down into the earth to mine, and send big drills down and get the ore up and out. And eventually what ends up happening is you have to have really big operations with strip mining and huge ore trucks and big cranes and all that to get the ore out. So we’re kind of in the early stages, but we’re probably a little bit past the guys picking up nuggets off the ground, those guys, the Bitcoin billionaires are out there already and they were in it at the beginning. And they took a lot of risk to do it. A miner coming west from New York City and heading out to the West to go join in the Gold Rush, he’s taking a lot of risk. He’s got a family still there in the city, and he’s out in the Wild West mining and takes a lot of risk. And some of those guys died. Some of them lost money in the cryptocurrency boom at the beginning, too. So we’re not right at the beginning stage, but the experts were saying that we’re still early on, so there’s a lot of ways to be of service to others here, and that’s we’re trying to do. One of the ways is by building miners and so on.
Blake: It’s not quite an easy, I might think, what the average person would want is to able to just go online and buy a miner. Right now there’s a few options for that, and I think that’s something that we’re going to kind of try to create down the line here. Right now, as we were talking, right where I’m staring at our supplies to start building our own miners. Of course we’re waiting for our GPUs to arrive, but once those get here, we’re going to try eventually come up with a model for kind of a mill ground miner. And I think going back to what stage we’re at in this game, Bitcoin is at the days that it’s almost 80% mined. So right now mining Bitcoin with some of the bigger players already out there that, you can’t even imagine have millions of dollars that they have invested in their mining operations. We’re not going to build to put even a dent against them with a home built operation right now. So I think kind of aiming for a mining machine that not only can mine Ethereum and some of bigger ones, but also we can switch to some of the Altcoins and kind of play off that field. That kind of easier entrance to the market, and you can kind of do it with more middle ground and cheaper expenses in terms of GPUs and things like that. So part of this learning experience is for us; we forced ourselves to build our own mining machines, and hopefully we can provide you with some helpful information there. And eventually down the road, create a plug and play miner that they are able to purchase off the website, and basically just pay for us putting it together, and you can just plug it straight in in the operating system, and everything will be ready for you to plug and mine. Now in terms of mining, I guess, one of the biggest questions is what you are mining. And so from my understanding, it is basically these block chains that are for Bitcoin for example, is that we’re processing the ledger. We’re doing some of the work for them, and in return of that, then you get a share. They’re kind of paying us back for being part of the network. And so hopefully that kind of clears that. That was my first question in terms of cryptocurrency. And yeah, I don’t know. So we’ll see where it goes. I’m sure the GPU market will even itself out eventually down the road. We probably got in on it at probably the worst time, but we’re excited people so we couldn’t hold back. So we’ll see and hopefully we’ll provide you with updates on how that’s going, and we’d love to hear stories from you guys out there in terms of building your rig.
Brandon: So Razer is going to be for sale off of our website, which is www.cryptocorelabs.com, and we’re going to probably have in the next few weeks some built some in the inventory. But we expect to kind of a waiting list there if you want to have one. But we’ll have that all set up. So keep checking back for updates on our miner that you can buy.
Blake: Alright. So this second need of the crypto that you hear about, and I think if you back to the financial world we live in now, is IPOs. And so in the crypto world we have what is called the ICO. Brandon, if you want to talk more about that.
Brandon: Yeah. An initial coin offering is a way for a business to get off the ground and fund themselves, and in some cases they’re running into different securities laws which tend to be very complex. And since you’re dealing with cryptocurrencies which are complex to start with, and then you throw in all of the securities laws especially here in the US, you have quite a bit of complexity. It’s going to be, as an entrepreneur, beware to make sure you don’t violate any of the laws and everything’s done in an ethical and legal manner. But the ICOs just, very basically speaking, are a way for a cryptocurrency or block chain company to get off the ground and get funded. And one of the services that’s needed, and we plan on providing some of these service, but they’re certainly going to be a big demand for it, is analysis of these and people becoming experts and analysts in this area. And so we see that as a way for you to become an expert in the area and sell that as a consulting service.
Blake: And I think down the road part of these ICOs is kind of understanding from the team itself. And so hopefully we can line up some interviews with some possible ICOs, not as a way to promote because once again we are not financial experts, we’re not giving legal advice or anything like that. But just to hear from their mouths what they see their ICO offering and to help us better understand the ICO from the ground up.
Brandon: Yeah. Anyone doing an ICO is going to be an enterprising entrepreneur like you are, and so we’d like to hear from folks. So if you are doing a cryptocurrency or block chain startup, or if you have a new business, or you have something interesting to talk to us about, we’d love to interview you. So contact us through the website www.cryptocorelabs.com.
Blake: And we’ll put up together an email, probably podcast@cryptocorelabs.com, and I’ll add that at the end of the podcast. I guess just to skip ahead, in terms of white papers, if you want to talk about that, so an ICO just kind of leaped this back as ICO right now, if you go and look at the new coin that’s going to come out, is that they provide this white paper.
Brandon: Yeah. So one of the big needs that we see in this growing space, block chain and cryptocurrency, is marketing and advertising and coherent messages. Because the masses are going to be in this whether they like or not fairly soon, and there’s going to be, as the monetary system moves to cryptocurrency, and the masses get into it, they’re going to have to know some of these products. But it’s complex, and the space is very complex, and explaining it is quite difficult. And so what’s needed are experienced people, writers, copywriters, marketing people, advertising people to get into this space and learn it and be able to explain it. So just as how I was explaining it with the old school mining analogy, there needs to be an analogy built to explain this. And there’s been some of the great people in crypto, Nick Szabo has a great analogy that he explains on the Tim Ferriss Show for our workweek podcast, and the block chain can be described in an analogy is a fly trapped in amber. And as the contracts and things exchanged over the network on the block chain, the transaction is like a fly and amber. And there are several coats of amber that grow over it, and you cannot get that and change that fly after a little while. And that’s the same way with transactions in a block chain that it’s there for everybody to see. It doesn’t matter if one person has an eraser, the network shows that the transaction actually occurred officially. And so there are many, many analogies that need to get built. There’s lots of graphics explaining the need to get built. There are many white papers need to get written, and so we’re throwing our shingle out as a marketing, advertising, writing, copywriting company, Crypto Core Labs to help you if you have a business or startup. But we think that there’s a heck of a lot more work out there than just we can do. So if you have a knack for writing or creating analogies or marketing, you’re buying ad space, then this should be an area you’re seriously, seriously looking at right now.
Blake: Alright, thanks Brandon. So now we’ve kind of covered ICOs, the marketing that surrounds them including white papers, bringing this really tough… This is why I like cryptocurrencies so much is that it’s in the financial world that’s already not easy to understand mixed with technology which is so exciting, and kind of has to do with my background. And it’s not easy for grandma and grandpa, but in 10 years I believe that they’ll have to, and hopefully at that point be much easier and a lot of this knowledge be, not dumbed down to say that, but dumbed down to my level at least. Let’s see. What else should be talk about today, Brandon?
Brandon: One of the things that we hope to do and it’s in development right now is a newsletter, and you can go sign up for all sorts of email, digital newsletters. But what I really love is the old school newsletter. I’m talking something printed on paper that’s delivered to you monthly that goes in to areas that need further analysis, perhaps some coins are undervalued in the market, and we found that and we can talk about that an apply some of the investing filters to analyze those. So we’re developing right now, I call it old school newsletter, basically paper, pen and ink, printed out newsletter that’s actually delivered to you on a monthly basis. And the first issue is going to be free, and we’re working on that right now. The first issue will always be available for free download at www.cryptocorelabs.com. So the newsletter is going to be interesting, something on a neat project that we’re working on. We’re going to continue talking about different to make picks and shovels in the newsletter as well, and probably have some interviews that are only available in the newsletter. And one final thing that we’re working on as well is creating our own, since we are a laboratory, we call our business Crypto Core Labs, we want to do some block chain development as well. We were standing up a programming group now to do some of this development, and so we hope to have more info on that in the future. So that kind of wraps up most of the things we want to talk about here which is how you can make picks and shovels in the crypto and block chain industry, because we see an enormous transfer of wealth. I think one of the biggest in history, at least in my lifetime I missed out pretty much on the dotcom boom, I was just in college at that time. And so now when I see this one happening with many of same patterns that the Internet boom came with and changed how we do things day to day, I want to take part in that and I want to be of service to others and show them how they can take part as well.
Blake: That sounds good. Thanks, Brandon. Thank you all for listening. I think we’re going to wrap up the episode there. Once again please reach out with any suggestions, and we hope to talk to you soon.
Outro: Thank you for listening to the Crypto Core Podcast. Please visit us at www.cryptocorelabs.com or email us suggestions and your feedback at podcast@cryptocorelabs.com.