 Today's episode of The Bitcoin Show is brought to you by MtGox, m-t-g-o-x dot com, and Bitcoin Bonus, Bitcoin Bonus dot com, and Meze Grill, M-e-z-e grill dot com. Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Bitcoin Show. This is episode 46, and today we're just going to do a really fun little interview because with someone who's arguably one of the most famous people in Bitcoin, although you may have never seen his face before. He's the guy behind, well, first of all, let me ask you this. If you Google Bitcoin, what comes up? Probably, if you put it into Google search terms engine, it will recommend alpaca. And you're going to wonder, what the heck does Bitcoin have to do with alpaca if you're new to Bitcoin? Anybody who's an old time Bitcoin person knows that everything to do with Bitcoin is alpaca stocks. We use coins dot com as probably the most recent thing that features an alpaca, but actually many, many of the early stories were about what you can buy with a Bitcoin, or more than one Bitcoin, maybe, and always what comes up is alpaca stocks. And people are like, what? What does alpaca stocks have to do with it? What it has to do with it is our guest today, the man behind grasshillalpacas.com, David Forster. Welcome, David. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. So you are, where are you based? Out west somewhere, I take it. Well, no, actually, Western Massachusetts is where the farm is located. And we have 19 alpacas currently here. It's a small family farm. I'm involved with the farm and also the Bitcoin part of it as sort of a sideshow to that efforts, although we've gotten more publicity for the Bitcoin part of it than we ever did with our farm, the farm itself. So it's been quite a wild ride we've had here. So when people ask which came first, the alpaca or the Bitcoin, it was clearly the alpaca. It did. I think it beat the Bitcoin by a couple of years. A couple of years? Yeah. So like what, 2007 or something like that? We started the farm in the beginning of 2005. We started getting ready to bring the first animals on the farm. The farm's been in the family for five generations, but it hadn't been used very much in terms of active farming for 30 years. So we put it back into production, yeah, a couple of six years ago now, and started off with alpacas and been growing ever since. And every great family farm has a geek in it, a tech geek, and you're the guy. I'm the guy. Yeah. And how did you discover, I mean so many questions, how did you discover Bitcoin? Well, that's kind of lost to the annals of history at this point, but I don't really remember it to be honest. Wow. I do know that I'm pretty sure I have an idea how I found it, and I'm pretty sure that that was, I read a book called, A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, and it was awesome. And I did a Google search to try to find some of these anonymous digital currencies. I thought it was a cool concept. I have as well as being a bit of a tech geek, I'm also an economics nerd, self-taught. So the idea really intrigued me. So I started Googling for, you know, anonymous digital currencies, and Bitcoins popped up, and at the time, I mean it was almost nothing. It was like nobody, really nobody had heard of it. Now, you know, a few people have heard of it, back then it was literally nobody had heard of it. They were selling for, you know, pennies, and I kind of dismissed the whole concept at that point for probably six months or so, until finally I kind of revisited it, and a couple, you know, a couple economic news stories around the world kind of convinced me to start actually looking at alternative payment methods a little more seriously. So I started doing research on Bitcoins, and I thought to myself, you know, how am I going to get one of these? Because frankly, I didn't trust, at the time I didn't trust anyone. I figured I sent an envelope full of cash. To get by Bitcoins, all I would lose is an envelope full of cash, and I wouldn't get anything. I decided to start figuring out a way to get Bitcoins in a different way, so I started thinking about what I could sell, and alpaxox came to mind since we were already selling them. And I whipped the site up, and you know, it took almost no time to put the site up. I listed my site on a couple of the web forms, and pretty much the rest is history after that. It just kind of blew up without me really doing much work in terms of marketing. And it's been pretty cool. And I got my Bitcoins, which was the original reason I started. Because you were able to, that is one of the easiest ways to get your hands on some Bitcoins is to sell something that you're already selling for Bitcoins, right? So in the early days, okay, when you first start, okay, now, okay, that's the Bitcoin side. Now back to the alpaca side. The farm's been going on in the family since 2005, or roughly, or four or five. And then, now, did your family get into alpacas to breed them and sell them? Or did they start out with manufacturing these knitted things like socks? Well we started off in just breeding alpacas and showing them. We show alpacas at all the alpacas shows. So when I say award-winning alpacas, that's what I mean. We go to alpacas shows and we win ribbons with them and then we sell the breeding stock to people who want to get in the industry and grow a herd for either fiber production or as breeding stock to increase the qualities of the herds. And when we started, it was really about that. We started selling socks, really just to try to pay the bills, basically just trying to break even in terms of out-of-pocket expenses year to year in terms of feed costs and things like that. Alpacas are very low maintenance, which was part of why we decided to go with alpacas. I wrote the business plan for the alpaca farm when my father told me, I have all this land, it's not being used, figure out a way that I might possibly someday make a little money, but some way of actually taking care of this land and improving it and something we can do as a family. So I wrote the business plan. It was between Highland Cattle and alpacas and frankly, there was a higher profit margin in alpacas. There was at the time, I think there probably still is. And they're a smaller animal so less daunting to try to manage than a 1,500-pound cow. So we went with alpacas and made our first purchase in, I think it was the end of 2004 and got the farm ready and took possession of them in 2005 and been growing organically since then, just breeding for our own herd improvement. Okay, now when you say organically, you mean naturally, are they not organically in the other sense? I mean organically is an on-farm expansion as opposed to going out and buying a whole bunch of animals. We have bought a few, but mainly it's just, we breed them, they have babies, our heart gets bigger, we sell some, etc. Although that said, we're not certified organic but we do, it is as close to that as we can get without putting the animals' health at risk. So we minimize their exposure to nasty things and we do our best to improve the soil quality so that we have the best possible animals as a result of that. So it will be healthy to eat the alpaca fiber? No, maybe not. Yes, if you could actually digest the fiber yet and if you could afford to eat the animals, then the animals would be quite healthy too, but at this point they are a little pricey. Does anybody eat alpaca meat? Oh yes, down in South America it's quite popular, in Peru they have 3 million alpacas and so when an alpaca gets too old, can't have babies anymore or if they have a baby they don't need for fiber for whatever reason, they do eat them down there as well as llamas which is a relative of the alpaca. I've never eaten alpaca, when I went to Argentina last year I did eat llama, I've heard it's very similar to alpaca and it's very similar to goat, it's quite close to goat. Wow, so how does the price of the meat compare to other meats down there, I guess it must be? Down there it's a little bit more expensive than goat, but it's not any, it's not out of reason. Yes, it's not crazy, although you don't necessarily find it a lot either, it's not necessarily extremely common, at least in Argentina, maybe in Peru but. It's just when they have excess alpacas for some reason. When did you guys get into manufacturing socks and are there any other products that you guys make with the fiber? We actually work with a fiber cooperative based in the northeast and we pool our fiber together with a bunch of different alpaca breeders, most of them in the northeast and all of them in the United States, so it's all US based and it's actually made at mills in the northeast, we don't actually have a mill on site here, we just work closely with some of the very small cottage industry scale mills that are making these socks for us in the area, they use the term loosely, but it's all relatively speaking regional and it's certainly all in the United States. So you actually, then you take your alpacas and you actually shear the fiber and send it off to them and then other farmers do too? Yes, we shear once a year and preferably right around May before it gets too hot and you take that fiber, you get between six and eight pounds on average per animal and you send that off to, we pool it with other growers, for one thing we're a small operation so if we had to come up with all the right colors of alpacas to blend together to get the different color products, we would really struggle to do that, we don't have all the color animals for instance, there are 22 different identified alpaca colors, to most people you wouldn't necessarily think that there's 22 of them because it's like dark gray, medium gray, rose gray, in terms of the browns there's beige, fawn, light brown, medium brown, dark brown and then you get into the blacks too, so there's 22 separate colors, we don't have that many on our farm. They're basically all gray, black or brown, and they're all basically gray black or brown in some variations. Or white, white's the most common actually. Yeah, you know this rug we have right here, I don't know if you ever noticed the rug, it looks like snowfall or something, but it's actually alpaca. Is it really? Yes, it's so soft, I had never, I don't think I've ever touched an alpaca except I don't know maybe in a petting zoo at some point in my life, but it's so, I've never felt any fur more soft, it's amazing. Yeah, it's softer, stronger, lighter and warmer than wool, it keeps you warm when wet unlike cotton, but it doesn't make you itch like wool because it doesn't have, I believe it's lanolin is one of the major component of that itchiness of wool. So alpaca fiber is not actually wool even though a lot of people call it wool, it's just a fiber, it doesn't have a name as far as I know, no one's coined a phrase for alpaca fiber yet, but yeah, and it's incredibly soft, which is what makes the socks and the and the other products we make. Currently, it's all we're selling for bitcoins is the socks. We do have a local shop that we set up right around Thanksgiving time that we sell some other products, but it's been it's been enough just to try to keep up with the sock sales. So I haven't expanded that yet. But but yeah, the the fiber is fantastic stuff. And the industry is growing in the United States. It's also used in a and this is one of the markets that's really been developing now is high end luxury fabrics. A lot of really high end suits will be made out of alpaca or are made out of alpaca. So there's a lot of potential there. Yeah, it's really cool. It would have to be high end luxury because it's not cheap. So like the the socks are the socks are as because they're the woven fiber. Are they as soft as the actual fur? Like I'm touching this actual fur here. Is it is it similar? I've never actually had my hands on a pair of socks yet. I'm going to order some. Oh, OK, yeah. So the the socks that we're selling are, I believe, they're seventy eight percent pure alpaca and the other parts nylon and lycra to give them to make a more stretchable. And help them to wear better. So but they are they're very soft. They actually get softer every time you wash them through and you can wash them just in standard washing machine. Dry them on either low heat or air dry, whatever. And they actually get softer every time you wear them. So every time you wash them. So and what's the like the texture? Is it are they are they thin like a dress sock? Are they thicker like a athletic sock? They are thicker. There's a well known brand of wool socks that I would compare them to. And so they're they're a thicker sock. They're good for like a hiking sock, although at the same time, they're not overly heavy and warm. So I consider them a three seasons sock. I don't wear them in the summer too much, but fall, winter and spring, they're very nice. We have been toying with the idea of introducing some other socks, including a like a casual dress sock, which would be a much thinner sock. We haven't done it yet, but it's we're probably going to shortly. And you can you can order these colors. I mean, can you literally choose from twenty two colors? Or is it like so? No, unfortunately, you can't. There are just four colors that we have available in terms of the socks, and that's mainly because not every color is all that abundant in sort of the genetics of the animals. So and the socks are made with a blend of the different colors to try to get consistency. If we tried to go with a you know, a certain color from a certain type of alpaca all the time, it'd be very difficult to get consistency across across lots. So that's why they're blended as they are. And actually, as it is, we're having trouble getting the darker socks. The the black alpacas are they're considerably fewer of them than, say, the white and even the lighter browns and browns. And that's just a genetic different. Basically, the the lighter colors are dominant genetically. So you have less and less fear of fewer of the black animals or the darker animals compared to the lighter animals. So we're actually having a lot of trouble getting enough black fiber to make the black socks and the gray socks. So we've been sold out for a while. I don't know yet whether they'll be in stock anytime soon. And it's just because of the the demand for those are really high and supply is relatively fixed. So and you don't do and they don't do any dying of the of the fiber at all. We don't. We don't. And the co-op that we we go we use we we work with doesn't die the socks. There are companies out to sell alpacas socks that are died. So you can get literally any color of the rainbow. Purple, if you wanted, yeah. We're out to fiber, but we do all natural colors. OK, that's cool. That's cool. I want to find out more about how much they cost and all those sorts of things. But let me take a break really quick and thank our sponsors, because obviously without them, we wouldn't be here. And they are Mt. Cox, obviously everyone in the Bitcoin community pretty much knows Mt. Cox. It's m t g o x dot com. Mt. Cox is the way the defect away. And they have something like 90 percent or approximately market share of buying bitcoins online. You can buy and sell bitcoins for currency, US dollars and like 16 new currencies they just added. So you can literally deposit money into Mt. Cox in any one of these currencies and then buy bitcoins with them. 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Check that out in the Android app store. And also, you can go to Mt. Cox live.com for more information about that. And we thank Mt. Cox. Be sure and send them a message and thank them for sponsoring the Bitcoin show and only one TV and Bitcoin bonus. Bitcoin bonus.com is an amazing service. It's much, much more exciting than it sounds at first, because I had been turned on to it way before I knew who was behind it or they decided to become a sponsor because people were saying that you can anything that you're buying online anyway, you can actually go to Bitcoin bonus.com, search for that merchant and get a click a link and get a referral link to that, whether it's buy.com or any of the major retailers. One particular person I heard from was a website designer and he buys hosting accounts in the name of his clients like several times a week. And so he goes and grabs that link every single time and he gets the idea behind it is you get a kickback in bitcoins. So every time you shop online, you're going to kick you get a kickback in bitcoins, so it's brilliant as I'll pack a socks on Bitcoin bonus. You need to be actually it is there you go. So yeah, there you go. See, that's what I'm saying. Like you wouldn't you'd be surprised what's on there. So you just go to Bitcoin bonus.com and search for alpaca and you'll find it. So when but when you go to buy your alpaca socks, you can pay in bitcoins and then you get a kickback in bitcoins. So it's a brilliant thing. It's just money you wouldn't have had otherwise in the form of Bitcoin. So check out Bitcoin bonus.com and we thank them for sponsoring us. And Mezzi Grill, everybody knows the world's first restaurant that accepts Bitcoin and also sells Bitcoin right there. They're open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they're right here in Midtown Manhattan, just three blocks south of Columbus Circle. Columbus Circle is a very famous tourist spot. Many films have been shot there. It's the entrance to Central Park and it's 57th Street and 8th Avenue. And Mezzi Grill is just three blocks, three really short blocks south of that, right? On it's on 8th Avenue, right? 8th Avenue at 54, 55. It's 8th Avenue and 55 on your left. So check it out, go to Mezzi Grill and you can check out their menu and pictures of the place at mezegrill.com and not only that, now they are they have franchise opportunities available. So you can own your own Mezzi Grill in your own town. Check it out. It's like it's kind of like a Chipotle style, but a little bit more upscale and it's Mediterranean food. So it's very, very healthy. But contact them at bitcoinatmezzigrill.com or just go to their website mezzigrill.com and thank them for sponsoring the Bitcoin show as well. So we're back with David Forster of grasshillalpacas.com. So it's grasshill, G-R-A-S-S, hill, alpacas, A-L-P-A-C-A-S dot com, right? That's how they find these products? Yes, OK. And there's a there's a link on that that main page to the the Bitcoin sales up pack of socks for Bitcoins page. So how much is a pair of socks cost? Are they are they all the same price? Are there different styles for different prices? They are they are all the same price right now for everything that's listed on that page. It's part of the reason why I haven't done offered any other types of socks. We could also do hats is just to try to keep it simple. But we will most likely be launching some new products in the near future. And so right now the price is three. What is it? Sorry. Yeah, three eighty five. It's changing as you speak, right? Well, yeah, the site is static. The price is static, but I change it as the Bitcoin market fluctuates. Yeah. So today it's three eighty five. And usually usually the price I list is a little higher than my actual price. And that is because I like to not raise the price when people contact me. I like to in fact give them a slightly better price. So when people contact me, I go to the market, find out what the Bitcoin rate is and calculate the price at that time. So some most of the time people get a better price than what's listed. Always better to under promise and over deliver. Yeah, exactly. That's the idea. So disappoint. That's the way I do it. And I haven't linked it in any way, automatically made it a dynamic price because just because I haven't taken the time to develop all the back end that would be necessary to do that and protect me from currency fluctuations in the exchange rate for Bitcoin. So yeah, this is the way I handle it right now. How often do you update the price every day? It depends on how fast the exchange rate moves. I think I've had three eighty five for several days now. And even though the Bitcoin rates been fluctuating considerably, I've left it alone. I've tried to I try not to change it so much that, you know, that every time someone looks at the site is different. I try to keep it a little bit more consistent as I can as much as I can. That's about the best you can do if you're doing it manually. And then when you when they actually place the order, you you will adjust the rate as of that moment that they're taking. Right. So I do it through email. It's not automated. People send me an email and I respond with a with an address and tell them what the price is at that time. And within reason, even if it takes people a few days, I honor that price. I told them originally at this point, I lock in my cost. Unfortunately, my suppliers don't take bitcoins yet. I'm working on them, but they're not there yet. So when I do make a sale, I lock in my my cost at at that time when I make the sale and turn it over into another form of currency that my suppliers will take. And and the remainder I keep on and it depends, but the remainder keep at least for that the time being. So yeah, keep it a bit quiet. OK, that's cool. So let's see. And so there are other various styles and sizes, I'm assuming. So right now it's just one style, but we do have different sizes. I can hold a couple of them up. We've got the this is the gray and the dark brown. I hope you can see that. Yeah. You also have this is the fawn or the light brown right here. It's kind of tough to tell, probably with the lighting, which is a perennial problem have my pictures don't do it justice. But and then the the always in demand black or dark gray. This is like the only one I have left. It's a kid's size and don't know when I'll be able to get more of these. But there it is. So for everyone who's been asking about them. So they're all the same price, even regardless of the color. Correct. Yeah, I've been toying with the idea that if I ever get any black ones in stock, I'll double the price of them because supply and demand. Supply and demand is hard to keep them in stock. So yeah, but I haven't done that. So we'll see if I actually do. And then they come in and like are there a variety of adult sizes? Or yes, there's there's the so-called just the women's, which is the medium and that's a sock size seven to ten. And then the men's is is called is the large and it's a sock size 10 to 13. We also have extra large, which is 13 to 16. And then the kid's sizes is four to six. And those are sock sizes. So when you're trying to figure out what size you are, you can Google your if you Google sock size to shoe size conversion. Most people don't tend to know their sock size. So I end up converting it for most people, but some people some people know. But I wear the size men's large, which is a 10 to 13. I'm a size nine and a half shoe. So that gives you a little bit of an idea on how that works. OK. It never seems fair that like a kid's sock should cost the same as a size 13 guy has it's true. It's true they use a little less fiber, but they're the manufacturing process is probably the same. Equal, if not more so, because it's smaller. Right. Right. A little bit more tricky, but true, true. Cool. And now do you ship them directly from your do you ship them yourself? Or is it coming from the co-op? I ship them myself. So we have them here. We keep a stock here. And when I get an order, I'll ship it out. Usually within 24 hours, I'll get it out in the mail. The prices include shipping, domestic shipping, international. I add more, but I don't gouge people on international shipping. It's it's what my cost is. So it's very reasonable since socks are light. So yeah, it's only a couple of bucks to ship to or a couple. Big, you know, what, like half of a Bitcoin to ship to Canada right now, I'd say. And maybe a little less than a Bitcoin to ship to most of Europe. So it's very reasonable. So you guys out there, you can actually support a local local farm, a family farm and a and a Bitcoin, one of the first Bitcoin early adopters and merchants, grasshillalpacas.com. So it's G-R-A-S-S Hill, H-I-L-L. Alpacas is A-L-P-A-C-A-S dot com. How have you, I mean, obviously, you've received a lot of free advertising, right? Because Alpacas and Bitcoins kind of have gone hand in hand since the beginning just because of you guys accepting it. And what like, have you been contacted by by media and done other interviews and things? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so things started to get really nutty when I think it was either February or March, we got slash dotted. And in that one 24 hour period, we had more hits to our website than we had for the entire history of our farm. To that point, isn't that crazy? And that happens, which is what was that? That's crazy when that happens, right? What that means is getting mentioned on slash dot. So when you get mentioned on slash dot, it's just huge. And you just get tons and tons of hits to bring your server down. And they had linked right to our site. It was it was fantastic. The best free marketing you can hope for when was when did that happen? When was that it was I think either it was February or March somewhere in that time frame, I don't remember the date, but early on. Yeah, it was early on and it was it was pretty wild. And sales were pretty good for a couple of weeks afterwards. That's back when Satoshi was still active in the community. Did you ever have any correspondence with him? Someone by that name has sent me a couple messages through our Facebook page, but other than that. Yeah, that's probably not him. But yeah, if it was from Satoshi on the forum, that's actually him. But we would assume. But yeah, Facebook now anybody. Everybody's taken on that name. I figured it probably wasn't actually. Yeah, exactly. You know, you never know. And we have been interviewed for some mainstream media publication, so I was interviewed for Smart Money, an article in Smart Money. That was care on the Yahoo Finance homepage for an entire weekend. Like, I had I had family and friends from around from around the country calling and emailing me, asking, you know, say, is that is that Dave? Is that you? Is that really you? That was pretty cool. I know it's crazy, right? Yeah, it really is. And then the New York Daily newspaper also wrote an article about bitcoins and featured us in that article as well. And a couple other I was interviewed for NPR, nothing that made it on the air, but it was in a one of their online articles. So yeah, just very cool. I mean, and stuff that we would never as a small farm ever be able to afford to buy that kind of publicity. And here it's coming to us for nothing. And also, I guess there's some conferences in Europe. I got contacted from someone saying that he wanted to buy two pairs of alpaca socks to bring with him to this conference in Spain. And he was going to give one of the pairs of socks away as like a door prize for his conference talk. So, you know, just really cool stuff. And then we've been selling. We've been able to sell because of this internationally, where before, you know, most of our sales were to people who lived within five miles of our farm. Now, now I've sold to people in Russia, Norway, Finland, the UK, Czech Republic, France, Canada and Australia and several other countries and all across the United States. So it's really been great for us as a small business. Yeah, that's the beauty of the internet. And which is a global network and a global currency of Bitcoin makes it so easy. You don't have to worry about currency conversion or anything like that. The speaking of conferences, we missed you at the the first Bitcoin conference in World Expo last month in New York. Yeah, I was I was in Communicado up in upstate Maine at the time. I was I had a long, long standing trip plan there, so I didn't make it. But OK, well, the next time again. Yeah, the next time for sure. We have to have an alpaca socks table. I mean, what is Bitcoin without that? That's great. So are you thinking about expanding into other products? You were talking about hats and and yeah, jackets and so we sell at our farm stand, which we open up right around Thanksgiving for holiday sales, which we sell just a bunch of the people in the area. Really, we do have other products that are available, scarves, hats, some other types of socks that we sell surrounded by some of the products here. But the we will almost certainly be doing that. It's just a matter of time for me. I've got quite a few irons in the fire right now. So it's been difficult to get that squared away. For one thing, the management of everything gets a little bit more hectic as there's more products, of course, which, of course, is easily easy to get over that hurdle, but just haven't done it yet. One thing, another thing that we're going to do and I'll announce it here on the show for the first time, we're actually going to be offering to sell an alpaca for bitcoins, which would be another first time, pretty sure, livestock for bitcoins. And working on some web page just to have the basic information. But we'll give a 10 percent discount for bitcoins sales and through November 1st for anyone who's been thinking about buying an alpaca and has a bunch of bitcoins burning a hole in their electronic wallet. We will sell them an alpaca. So it's probably more secure in some ways because it'd be more difficult to steal someone's alpaca than their bitcoin. Well, it depends. It depends on where you sheep it, I guess. I mean, it's not easy to steal an alpaca. Yeah, it's kind of hard to pick up and carry out. They bite? They don't bite, but they do spit. Oh, they spit at you. But they don't do it unless you really make them mad. But I suspect trying to carry one off would make them mad enough. Yeah, pretty typical if they don't know you. Do you, I mean, do they recognize you? Do they know you? Are they like pets? Some of them. So they're a herd animal. They're they're a prey animal and a herd animal. They have pretty much no natural defenses other than being in a herd. So what that means is that they're pretty flighty, but they have gotten to know us and we have some of the animals that are so friendly, they'll come up to anyone and give them a kiss. So we call it. They come right up to your face and we'll put their nose right up to you and smell, smell your nose and we call it, you know, giving kisses. It's not normal alpaca behavior. In Peru, you would never see that. And we have some animals that are much more standard alpaca dispositions. They're not mean, but they're just they're they're afraid of you. Yeah, generally speaking. So it also depends on whether it's a pregnant mother or mother with a small baby. They're a little bit more ornery, but true, true. And so I mean, you're not obviously you're not you're not using them for meat or anything like that. So it's only for their fur, their fiber. So when so and you say that you only share them once a year. So basically you care for them the whole entire year for yielding the fur once a year. Correct. Wow. And and the the nice thing is the alpaca fiber is valuable enough that, you know, you can make a profit on the alpaca fiber sales, especially if you if you go into the lower end animals and you start small, you can buy an inexpensive animal, breed it, have babies, share the animals and sell the fiber, you can make money. When you buy the higher end animals, what you're really doing there is trying to sell the top end breeding stock and win, win awards just like with other livestock. Wow. So that's how it works. And then the other the other thing that makes it work is that they are extremely maintenance free, carefree. Our veterinary bills are almost zero. Our feed bills are very low. We spend the time to really improve our soil and our pastures so that we don't have to feed them expensive supplements and everything else. And then the probably the biggest expense is is hay, actually, and that's pretty reasonable, too. They don't eat a lot. They're not big animals. That's what I was going to ask you to eat a lot. Yeah, but they just they're they weigh between 150 to 175 for a full grown animal. Some of the larger males might get up to 200 pounds or so. But they're not a huge animal. So and they don't they really don't eat that much. And they're very content to eat nothing but grass, as long as it's high enough quality pasture, they don't really need grain at all. We we do supplement the females, especially especially the pregnant females, we supplement a small amount of grain, especially in the winter months, to get them the extra calories they need and some of the minerals that might be lacking in the hay, but very, very carefree animals. Wow. So they eat grass and hay. So like like cattle eat grass and horses eat hay, right? So they cannot eat both. Yeah, more or less. Those rules, how much I know about farming and livestock. Yeah, those rules are, you know, they're generalizations, but for instance, although in Peru, alpacas are much smaller and they don't really eat grass or hay. They eat scrubby, dead brush in the high Andes mountains. If you actually look at pictures of where they're actually from, you'd be amazed that anything can survive there at all. So what we give them here with nice green grass is actually orders of magnitude better than what they native, what they would have had in their native habitat, which I think was very interesting. And as a result of that, actually the quality of the fiber and the amount of fiber an alpaca produces in the United States is in some cases an order of magnitude better, slash more than what they produce in Peru. So it's very interesting how that works. They're spoiled, of course, typical American alpacas that are spoiled. And yeah, I mean, if you're going to be an animal, I would much rather be one that is raised for my fur than my meat. They live a lush life and they do get a haircut once a year. Exactly. That's a good life. That's nice. Do you have anything else on your farm? Other other do you grow anything else or have other livestock there, too? Yeah, we we have a few goats that help us to keep the brush cleared. They're amazing brush clearing machines. Just and then just a standard issue, sort of multi species farm. We have some chickens running around, some guineas running around eating the ticks. And then this summer, I had a big a large garden we were selling produce from. Didn't make any sales for our bitcoins. I tried, but not a lot of local people that are coming by a farm stand with bitcoins with bitcoins in their pocket. But yeah, I got out the word a little bit more, which is also important. Yeah, anything you can sell online, obviously, you can do Bitcoin. There are there are these organic dairies like Ed buys. There's this place called utter milk that he buys raw milk and all kinds of dairy products, and it's like a co-op because that's the only way they can do it legally, apparently. I mean, it's like illegal to eat natural food. Yeah, it's kind of bogus. Yeah, so, so, so bogus. But if you're a member of a co-op, somehow there's some loophole in that way. And then you're so you're a member of this organization. And then they actually deliver. They come with a truck and they deliver once a week in Manhattan. So you so we get raw milk and cheese and eggs and on and on like everything. Heavy cream, all sorts of stuff right from the farm, right from the cow. And that's excellent weekly. Yeah, really nice. In Mass, unfortunately, in Massachusetts, it's even more silly. You're actually not allowed to sell raw milk in Massachusetts except right directly off the farm. So that kind of an operation can't actually exist under current Massachusetts law, which is totally ridiculous, of course. Connecticut is is better, though. You can actually buy raw milk in the grocery stores. So they're a little bit ahead of the head of the game in terms of allowing people to eat what they want. I think it's Connecticut. That's where the farm is that we get that from, I don't know. Not sure what state that's. Oh, it's New Jersey, OK, utter milk. It's U-D-D-E-R, like a cow's utter, uttermilk.com is the one that and we can order online. It's like crazy. It's I guess it's in New Jersey, but every state is a little bit different. Yeah, I mean, how long is it going to be before, you know, you it's illegal to breathe air unless it's bottled by Danon? You know, I mean, it's really, really scary. He's Monopoly, well, I mean, you can't breathe in air because then you breathe out CO2 and that's just wrong. Yeah, exactly. Unless it's been pasteurized and sanitized by corporatology and profit. So well, thanks so much for joining us. Is there anything you want to tell the world about alpaca socks and selling alpaca socks for Bitcoin or any any thought you'd like to leave the public with? No, I can't think of anything that I haven't already already mentioned, but just ask people to check out the website and be there'll be more. There'll be more stuff coming out from us and anyone who has a business that's thinking about getting into Bitcoin sales, I highly recommend it. Small business is a great way to do it. There's you know, there's some a learning curve to it. There's some there's some things you got to take into consideration that you might not normally think about like exchange rate risk, but it's all manageable. Yeah, and if I can do it anyway, do it. Have you had any problems with chargebacks or identity theft? Or none that I know of transaction fees. No one's ever come back to me with any problems. I I've been using Trade Hill to sort of to do my exchanging and I've been happy with them. Before I got before I got too big and before I got too many bitcoins, if you will, I was actually using the bitcoins to buy other products. And that's all I was doing. Now I still do that, but I also do have to turn some in the US dollars to pay suppliers. But it'd be really great if someone would open up a fertilizer company or something that accepted bitcoins. But I'm working on that. It's one of my many projects. But so if you have a fertilizer company out there, was that I'm telling I'm telling the audience? If you have a fertilizer company out there, set it up to accept bitcoins. Just go to bitcoinme.com and then click on accept. And there's simple, simple Fisher price instructions on how to accept bitcoins. It just takes two seconds. It's so easy. And you've got a customer right here in Grass Hill, Alpacas.com. There they want to buy fertilizer. All you got to do is accept bitcoin. So there you go. See, that's how it works. You got a customer there that's all built in customer. I know I hear that all the time from merchants like Roger Ver from memory dealers. He's he's like trying to get more and more of his suppliers to accept bitcoin. Because if you can, you know, you start with the retail operation and then you move your way back to the suppliers and their suppliers and so on. And it's just this domino effect. Then all of a sudden everybody accepts bitcoin. So it's it's a whole new world there. Well, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking the time and showing us the products. And I'm I can't wait till I'm all decked out. I want to do it. I want to do it in the future when you've got and I'll pack a hat and I'll pack a jacket and I'll be wearing my pack of socks. And I'll just be ready. Ready for winter in New York. All right. Thanks so much. All right. Thank you. Take care. Have a good day. All right. And we'll see you guys the same time tomorrow.