 Hello everyone. Thanks for showing up to Market Talks. I'm Ray, head of Markets at Cointelegraph. Here on the show we discuss the latest in what's shaping the markets with valuable insights from industry leaders, traders, and influencers. Today's guest I'm really excited about having on is Drew Vosk, founder of Voscoin. Drew has been in the game for a minute. I think he started five or six years ago just by posting his videos of his experiments with GPU and ASIC mining, mining Ethereum, Dogecoin, Bitcoin, many other cryptocurrencies and watching him navigate and troubleshoot the challenges of mining crypto from home has been a real journey. And over time, his experiences have kind of become a textbook that aspiring miners have followed. Drew's Voscoin channel is one of the fastest growing crypto channels on YouTube. He has over 607,000 subscribers. And in the channel, he covers everything from building GPU mining rigs, a somewhat obsolete endeavor now, to comparing the pros and cons of different Bitcoin miners. Plus, he gives his daily view on crypto news, tutorials on how to mine coins, how to link up with mining pools, and how to make sure that home-based miners have their electricity properly configured. Drew, welcome. Thanks for coming on. Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. How's life? You know, it's kind of like the crypto market. It's highs and lows. Highs and lows. Last couple months have been tough. As I know everyone kind of feels that way with just a lot of these black swan events and crypto, among other things. But, you know, not giving up. I think a lot of people see that bear markets are very testing. They're trying. And, you know, you watch a lot of people capitulate. And it's really unfortunate because bear markets, even though honestly, they're kind of miserable, they provide, you know, all the opportunities to set yourself up to like really make plays and make gains and, you know, move forward, make progress, everything that a lot of people aspire for in crypto in the next bull run. So, yet you've just got to have the conviction and the belief. And what's crazy is bull market come out of the blue. They're really fast. The whole time that we're in a bull market, I'm always questioning myself, like, is this really happening? Should I take profits? Can it go higher? Is this going to last? Or then before you know it, it's over. Whereas like with a bear market, you think it's going to, you feel like it's starting to come to an end. There's a light at the end of the tunnel and then boom, kablam, whammy. Here's another thing that like takes the market and prices down lower and lower and lower. They last a lot longer than you would ever anticipate, don't they? Yeah, it's, it's, you know, it tests your relationships in your life because they're like, dude, all you ever do is this crypto stuff. And it's like, well, it's very consuming. And crypto, you know, it's 24 seven, 365. It doesn't sleep trades all the time. I remember I think it was two Christmases ago. Bitcoin was hitting an all time high. I'm just trying to like relax a little bit and like spend some time with family, whatever. But I keep finding myself glued to the phone and like a new airdrop happens and you're just like, we're all crazy, you know, crazy in this sector. But yeah, I find I've never met someone who's into crypto and ever says they're bored. It's never boring. So the biggest thing people probably make is they get bored and stop paying attention during the the flattest part of the bear market, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's the bear market is really the time to like sharpen your tools. It's in the bull runs, you need to be making trades, you need to be making place. And it's when there's not as much going on, that's a great time to learn about a new blockchain, to learn about a different side of crypto. Like for me, a big transition I had was moving from being just very mining focused to really opening up the world of decentralized finance, DeFi. And I like had to drag some of my mining friends and some of them, they just clawed the whole way, I couldn't even bring them, because they just weren't interested like, dude, I don't I don't know, I don't care, I don't want to learn. And even existing people who can end up like very deep into crypto can find themselves resistant to learn about like the new thing. And the new thing, you know, just can provide a lot of opportunity. You've got a good point there because it takes so much effort and energy to kind of break out of that niche and comfort zone and just doing what is working for you to then go and explore something new. And, you know, for those friends that you drug into DeFi, and they've explored something new. And prior to it, they were probably telling you it's a Ponzi or it's a scam. Now it's like we got egg on our face because sure, I did DeFi, I did NFTs, I made, you know, great profits and gave some of it back to the market, right? And then I pulled my friends into it. And it worked for me. But now that all that stuff is blown up, it's kind of like, these people have been burnt to the extent that the next time around, you might not be able to convince them or there's a lot of, I told you so, this was a Ponzi, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's unfortunate. Just a couple of bad projects just can really do a lot of damage to a sector. I mean, you have an NFT project and they have a mint and then they rug and all that Ethereum is gone and all your left with is like a little picture maybe. But you didn't mint the NFT just for the picture. You minted it for the community, the ecosystem there is supposed to be building maybe on their roadmap. They had a token launch, maybe they were doing a play to earn game, whatever. And it may seem like other projects of the past that have been successful, but then this person gets burned and they're like, NFTs are a scam. And then they send you that South Park episode. So, you know, you don't really know what to say back, you know, sorry, you had a bad experience, but there are some good ones out there. Exactly. So, I guess we should steer into the direction of your expertise. How's Bitcoin mining looking right now and what sort of things are impacting the bottom line for you and other miners right now? So when it comes to Bitcoin mining, it continues to change, evolve and grow like everything in the space. And I think a lot of people can get too complacent about what it was or even dreaming of what it should be. All that matters is what it is and what it's going towards. I'm not trying to sound like a philosopher or anything when I speak vaguely like that. In retrospect, I wish I went heavier into Bitcoin mining earlier. And even with my existing farm I've been trying to build, I've been playing the long game with it. And I feel like I'm really like two years behind where I wanted to be. I wanted to have a bigger version of my farm up and operational before the previous bull run that has now come and gone. Which, you know, there's pros and cons to that. I mean, Bitcoin miners are so expensive. So many Bitcoin miners raised a bunch of money. They went public and the industrialization of Bitcoin mining is bigger than it's ever been. I mean, it was only like a month or two ago, the Bitcoin network hit a new all-time high in hash rate, which means that it's more difficult than ever to mine a Bitcoin, which means more competition and basically less profits. So for me looking forward with a halving on the horizon, and then after that halving comes another halving, I don't want to look too far ahead, right? But, you know, it raises the questions of the long-term sustainability of Bitcoin mining from how many coins are being minted, right? And we have so much hardware deployed. And if, you know, we're only getting three coins a block. That's, I mean, obviously, like the simple math is obviously it's half, right? But can I afford to run a half the profits? Because we all think that things will go up after the next halving eventually, new all-time highs. We hope for it. We dream for it. But nothing's guaranteed except that we're going to get taxed and we're going to die. So, you know, it's interesting. It's kind of almost like being as bullish as you can afford to be. The bigger your mining farm, the more gear you have deployed, the more you can stack coins and not just stay afloat, then the better you'll be positioned, you know, in a bull run, in a positive price appreciation, obviously, hopefully a new all-time high in price. Not to drone on too long, but one thing that really has like been thrown into question recently is how much did SPF and FTX and Alameda manipulate cryptocurrency prices? Has Bitcoin's price been suppressed? Or is it actually kind of been propped up? You know, there's arguments for both sides. The fact that they were basically trading Bitcoin that never existed makes it like even more difficult to kind of break down. On one hand, you know, it makes me hopeful that we're going to see more of a linear price appreciation moving forward as the market recovers. I think the case for Bitcoin is still very heavy. It's a crypto that we can trust. And a lot of, you know, just trust in cryptocurrencies has been misplaced because of all of these recent events. And I think when we look at earning yield, lending coins, things like that, after recent CFI blow-ups, centralized finance blow-ups, like centralized exchanges, I'm never going to put my Bitcoin on the table again. You can keep your one, two, three, five percent, whatever. Those coins are going to stay in cold storage period. It's been a very painful lesson for me personally, among many others. And so, you know, we'll have to see where that goes. The one other thing I do want to say in regards to Bitcoin mining right now is a lot of major players have gone public and they've done absolutely terrible and some have gone bankrupt or are on the brink of bankruptcy. When they shut down or if they shut down and when they shut down or whatever else, we've got a lot of cheap mining rigs hitting the market because many of these operations would just simply be liquidated. It's going to make it easier to get a Bitcoin miner. The competition will be decreased because many of these will be offline, but many of these will still find new homes. There's still many miners, many operations. Bitcoin mining builds lag even a year behind price. And a year ago, Bitcoin was still doing pretty solid, at least we realize now in retrospect. And when you deal with these buildouts, material shortages, permits and everything like that, it just takes so much longer than people realize. They think they're going to buy this gear and be up in three months. Oftentimes they sit there six, eight, 12 months or more before these machines actually get plugged in. So, but I don't want to talk too long, you know, I got a lot to say sometimes. Yeah, you said a lot there and I intend to kind of follow up on some of those and unpack it in this conversation. One thing you mentioned I'll just say about Bitcoin price and its valuation and the upcoming halving is there's some on-chain metrics out there that show that price should sit atop cost of production. And cost of production is pretty high and always rising, and cost of production right now is higher than minor profitability, right, in actual Bitcoin price. So that's an issue and I'm very curious on kind of analyzing how does that dynamic change as we enter into the next halving cycle. But going back to, you know, your experience as a smaller sized Bitcoin miner versus these big guys, how do your challenges as an at home based miner compare with the challenges that are faced by industrial miners? I follow your channel and, you know, I've seen how you deal with like electricity cost and getting ample electricity into your home and getting fixed rate electricity contracts and all these sort of things like what are your challenges, your major challenges as an at home miner compared to what the big boys are dealing with? So the biggest thing is a small time miner is you've got no power, no negotiation with your electric company. These major buildouts, they go to the electric company, they negotiate, they get things in ink, right, they get things guaranteed and then they build out around that. A proper Bitcoin mining farm, I get especially building out towards industrial scale, you go to cheap power and you build out around there. You don't pick, you know, the spot by the beats that you want to live at and you're like, this is a great spot to live. Let's build a farm here. You go to cheap power and as an at home miner, you kind of fall like, especially initially, you're more of like a hobbyist. You live where you live and your electricity rate is your electricity rate. So you run the numbers, your price per kilowatt hour, how much it costs you to operate a mining rig. Unfortunately, it just may never be feasible for some people. If your electricity rate is 20 cents plus per kilowatt hour, right, if you're maybe like California or you're in a country like Germany with notoriously high electricity rates, like you're going to have a bad time. And as cool as mining is, it doesn't make sense to buy gear for thousands of dollars, mine hundreds of dollars of Bitcoin and then pay thousands of dollars to the electricity company. For me, how I personally navigated it is, you know, historically, things have just been pretty profitable even at residential rates continues to get tougher. I think that Bitcoin mining is actually overbuilt right now. I think that many operations receive tons of funding. Again, we have all these new publicly traded miners, those dozen companies. And, you know, they buy big, they buy in bulk. And that makes it so much difficult to compete as a little guy, which, you know, there's there's two ways there's kind of two ways you can go from here, I think is you produce your own power to offset it. Solar panels or, you know, solar power and solar panels are a popular option there. The high upfront cost, it's not like it's just, you know, simple and easy, right? You got to play the long game. You don't put solar on a house that you're going to move from in a couple years. Like you need to hopefully you need to be in a place where you're happy to stay or at least keep, which is basically I don't want to talk too much about just myself, but that's kind of my long term play is I'm building out a bigger Bitcoin mining farm. We just pulled in 1200 amps of electricity, which I'm super excited about, which is six times the capacity that I've ever had. And, and that's all dedicated to mining, which is really puts in more like 12 times the capacity I've ever had. But I'm pulling power, getting everything set up and situated. And then I'm going to run the numbers and start to build out solar. And I'm actually going to hedge my mining farm with power generation, no matter what generating electricity will be valuable moving forward. And it will only become more valuable. Electric vehicles are being pushed through with regulation. The common just desires of people, they're becoming better. And to put it simply, we are going to see an astronomical increase in adoption of electric vehicle usage. And that is going to draw electricity. These things will all be fueled with electricity from the grid, not petrol, fuel, gas, right? Which means that what these mining rigs are running off of, what your Netflix box, you know, your fire stick, whatever is running off of, and your car are all now pulling from the same source. That's more demand. Prices are going to go up. And it's going to make, and I think that is going to burn some people bad in mining because they're just not opening their eyes and accounting for that. It's actually scary because electricity rates are up significantly recently. And they're going to continue that way. We're dealing with, you know, almost unprecedented inflation in the United States. And electricity consumption continues to rise. We had a small pullback with like a big adoption of things like LEDs, right? But there's more and more electronics in the house than ever. I mean, people have their just attachments and adaptions for everything. We used to flick a light on with a switch. Now, you know, you ask Echo to do it, you got a smart switch, you got an electric timer, whatever, those are small things, maybe not the best examples. But it's really just the development of the smart home. And now you have cars on electricity. And it's just like everything is revolving around the grid. So I'm personally hedging that way. And if you're in a good spot where you're situated and you plan to live there, I think getting into solar is just one of the simplest and best options, even just like unrelated to mining, to be your own power provider, because electricity is not going to get cheaper. Think of an electric bill 10 years ago versus today. It was cheaper. In 10 more years, it's going to be more expensive. And the sooner you get into panels, sooner you can hopefully pay them off offset your bill, whatever, it's a win. And so that's how I'm personally hedging my farm is building towards being a power producer and mining, right, pay off the panels, pay off the miners, hopefully everything's paid off, that's great. But the end game is also to sell back to the grid, depending on my situation, right, if it's more profitable to just run the gear I have, and I can make use of it all, then I'll just keep mining away. But there's a very viable alternative that like it may be crazy that we may the next big mining play may be just mining the sun with solar panels. I don't know if this sounds like funny, obvious or ridiculous or whatever, but I truly believe that's the direction we're heading with everything. And I'm just trying to set myself up. Number one is survive. Going number two is hopefully thrive and flourish. And I'm trying to set myself up for that. Right, right, right. Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about your solar mining farm and how's it going. So you're pulling in 1200 additional watts of power. And you've got all your panels set up now or those delivered. I'm in the great state of Texas. And two years ago, I locked down 12 cents per kilowatt. So I had run all my kind of like mining ROIs on that. But that's about to end. And I'm pretty sure that the cheapest I could find was around 15 cents or 15 and a half per kilowatt, which when you go to DX pool and you'd like look at it as a 100 terawatt or 110 terawatt S 19 J pro, it's not profitable, you know, like the capex, the OPEX, the debt, it just it's easier to I think for me to just buy spot Bitcoin or dollar cost average into it. And so I looked into solar and it looked like it would be 11 panels on top of my house to run a 3500 watt S 19 J pro, right? So just can you can you can you like briefly run us through like, what's your cost versus ROI? And I know you said you're hedging by selling power back to the grid. What's your strategy on mined coins? Also, do you keep 100% of those and wait for the next bull market top or do you sell 50% of the mining rewards to cover your capex and OPEX and then hold on to the rest like walk us through a little bit of the numbers on your solar mining farm. So I wish I was further ahead than I am currently. Right now, I'm sure building just didn't help. It didn't help. And I wish I was further ahead with the build out basically as stands, I'm building a mining farm. And then I'm upgrading it to be a solar powered farm, because I've got to get every I've got a lot of gears sitting here. And unfortunately, a lot of my gear, even at my electricity rate, which is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour, not great. But you know, it gets the job done. Sometimes is basically I have gears sitting here idly, I can't deploy it, I don't have the power. And it's actually being wired actually as we speak right now, which is pretty cool. By the end of the month, everything will be completely wired up. I'll have the equivalent of basically two mining sheds, mining containers, things like that. And I'm going to be utilizing Starlink is my internet access, there's nothing hardwired out there, we're about a mile from the road. You know, which is you talk to these internet companies, they want like 40 grand to run you service out there. It's crazy. So that's that's that situation. And, you know, moving moving forward for me, it's really just kind of a situation of running the numbers, which sounds a little boring, right? But for existing hardware, you run the numbers, if it earns more coin, then it burns electricity, why wouldn't you run it? If and, you know, the legal advice is like, you got to consult a professional on this one, all that stuff. But, you know, from a business point of view, which I operate as basically, if I'm in the green with certain aspects of the mining farm or the rest of Voscoin's business, then I can run some gear at a loss, expense it. And number wise, it's basically worth doing, right? And that's the big thing is you evolve from a hobbyist to a business is, you know, you have an investment, you have expenses, and you know, you have profits, you know, I paid my taxes on everything. Some people try to skirt around it on a small scale. But, you know, there are benefits from the tax system, but you need to operate accordingly. You need to pay attention, you need to keep good records, you need to expense everything that you can. And that's a mistake I see the average new miner make. Like, you're buying gear that costs thousands of dollars. Dude, like, you're running a business. So, you know, take advantage. And moving, like, so then my mindset shifts to this gear's good to run, right? So we run it. And mine certain amount of coins, Bitcoin, other different cryptocurrencies, whatever. The conservative way to operate is, let's say, I mine 10 coins a month, right? And it costs me one coin in electricity. I just sell the coin. And then I'm completely past my expenses. And I've got nine coins in my pocket. The other thing is buying the gear, right? So I do think it's best to take profits on against your gear. Basically, pay off your gear, take from the coins you're mining, pay your electricity bills. Then you've got paid off gear and you're in the green. And at that point, I think it's best to stack all your coins, right? Stack all your coins and just wait for a good time. At this point, all your stuff's paid off. You should have no debt. You're not occurring, you know, any interest bills, things like that. You're paying down your reoccurring bill, which is the electricity bill. That includes the internet bill as well. You're immediate expenses for this. If you're renting an area or whatever, pay that too. When you pay all those things and you're in the red, it's not a good business. Your numbers just don't line up, which sucks to say, but that's the reality is mining in some areas in some conditions is just not a profitable endeavor. And if it's not a profitable endeavor, it just shouldn't be pursued. At that point, you should just buy the coins because cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, everything is incredible. And mining is a great way to earn passive income, diversify, operate a business. Again, huge tax benefits when you do it properly. But it isn't a endeavor. There are things you need to learn. It's pretty hands-free, but there's that initial learning curve of what gear do I get? How do I set it up? What's a switch? What's an ethernet? Some people know these things. Some people don't know anything on the technical side and they get into mining. So once you get past that initial learning curve, sky's the limit on how far you can take it and you want to and given your circumstance. Upkeep is pretty simple. You pretty much just keep these things clean. It's not like you need to maintain your electricity circuits. They're pretty much good to go. You just operate within the 80% rule, keep things safe, overload your circuits, and you're good to go there. For me, my final point, kind of hopefully answer the question properly, is the pivot towards solar. So where I'm building my solar farm, my solar mining farm, I don't plan to ever sell it. I plan to keep this until I die, whenever that is. So it's a long-term play. I don't think that the solar pivot makes sense for everyone, but I believe in Bitcoin and crypto forever. And mining is the coolest piece of all of this that is unfortunately just underappreciated in this era. And a lot of mainstream media has attacked Bitcoin as being power, hungry, a waste, whatever. The electricity consumption of Bitcoin fails against many other industry sectors. Let's say banking just for one. Most of the farms operate on renewable electricity, things like that, energy sources. And that's all fine and great. And that is a piece of why I want to do solar. It is that renewable aspect. I don't feel bad at all about burning up every watt I make from my panel that harnessed it from the sun. It's not like I'm just digging into the Earth's core, shoveling a bunch of coal into a machine, furnace, whatever. I'm not emitting anything, like any kind of negative impact towards the environment that way. I'm generating my electricity and I'm burning it up and I make some heat along the way, whatever. Obviously, there's a little bit more and you can nitpick a couple of things, but that's how I feel personally. So it's a long-term play. I will run these panels until they do not operate anymore, period. And it's just a race for me against these solar panels becoming just obsolete or depreciated or no longer functional and my hardware becoming obsolete. Because every year new mining models come out roughly and the more efficient they're better. If I can pay the gear off, I can pay the panels off. It's a simple play. I make my own electricity and I pay it off all my gear and it earns whatever it earns. And that's green. That's the profit. So that's me personally. That's how I operate. It's a very long-term play. This is not some crazy shit coin trade that we've got leveraged 100x and we're looking at it all night. This is something that I'm passionate about and it's fun. It's enjoyable and I want to translate how I do all of this in video content so other people can follow along on the Bosco and YouTube channel and they can deploy their own setups, whether that's solar for one mining rig or 100 mining rigs. I want to show the step-by-step process and how I powered the first one with solar energy to how I powered 100 of them. And the short-term goal is a really medium term goal. Probably for me is to be mining one Bitcoin a month. I think that's a really cool figure. Bitcoin is at a pretty decent price point compared to historically. So I've got some achievements. I'm basically hitting the reset button on all my mining metrics. Once I get this up and running, I want to document when I mine my first coin. So I'm pretty excited about that. And then try to get my reoccurring coin up to that one Bitcoin a month figure and just kind of go from there. I have a history in gaming. I like gamifying things. It's fun. It's motivating. And it's goals. You don't feel like you have something to work towards. You don't feel like you get a sense of accomplishments and when you're kind of in it for yourself, like this is a self-employment entrepreneurial endeavor, right? There's no award ceremony for being an employee of the month. You got to hype yourself up sometimes and be like, bam, on that date, we mined our first Bitcoin. I'll put a little plaque on the wall, take a cheesy selfie with it and move on. And so I don't know. That's just kind of where I'm at for better and worse. Maybe I've gone crazy along the way. But I do really enjoy this stuff. Yeah, I can tell. And the reward you'll get is you get to take tails on a wall, Kray. That's what she'll give you. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us she's my dog, my she-been or doge. No, she's fine. She's incredible. Yeah, I know she's really into what you do. We got some questions from the audience. Two, one from KW and one from Raymond Safadi. The first one is, do you have any recommendations for an at-home Bitcoin node? And by operating a node, will you earn Satoshis? And then the other is, with the Bitcoin halving coming up, is it better to invest in mining altcoins? So when it comes to Bitcoin nodes, it's really a selfless act. There's no reward for running a Bitcoin node, which I think is a flaw in the design of Bitcoin. Nodes are important for the blockchain transactions, everything like that, right? Storing that distributed ledger. And they're not incentivized, which fortunately, there's been enough good actors to just keep running them. And we have a solid node setup. But I personally think that they should be incentivized. Just like miners are incentivized to mine the coin, nodes should be incentivized because they're providing a service. Miners are essentially like the security, right? And we can maybe call nodes like the record keepers. I know that CASA has those pre-made Bitcoin nodes that are kind of plug and play. But with something like this, I think since there is no reward, it needs to be a passion project. So I think DIYing every aspect of it and running it on your own network in your home, or your business, your office, whatever is the best play. Nodes on virtual servers, VPS is things like that, aren't as valuable because if digital ocean goes down, then we could lose a huge chunk of the nodes. So it comes, you come back to being distributed, right? That a popular term in crypto, you need to distribute the nodes. You need to distribute the miners. It's one of the reasons why a ton of miners concentrated in a big industrial mining farm is not as beneficial as, say, every person in the state having one miner. You have all these different networks, it's distributed, it's antifragile, it's powerful. And this is a financial revolution and a movement. And the strength of that needs to be illustrated with the node deployments, with the miners, everything like that, in my opinion. So the other question was on altcoin mining. Yeah, with the halving coming up, should people invest in mining altcoins? What's up, Raymond? Everybody loves Raymond, right? How many times do you get that joke? I'm sorry, man, I had to do that too. I couldn't help myself. Sometimes it's just everybody makes fun of Alexa Ms. Vaz, because her name's Alexa. So she gets hit with Alexa jokes all the time. And even sometimes I slip up and do it. But she doesn't like it, by the way. But when it comes to altcoin mining, honestly, the halving is scary for Bitcoin. People underestimate it every time. And from the mining point of view, like when Bitcoin halved in 2020, the following really several months until Bitcoin started to really creep up in price, mining was terrible. It was not profitable. And it's not all about dollars, right? But that's what you measure everything in. That's who gets your electricity bill. They're like, hey, dude, you owe us 900 satoshis, 0.03 Bitcoin, or whatever. They're like, hey, you owe us $1,293. Also, why do you use so much electricity? You're like, oh, I'm a gamer. It's still bad to tell them you're like mining. It's weird. They don't understand. Some people have been hit with height rakes on their electricity because their electric companies found out that they were mining, and they basically don't like it, don't support it, or that would cause them to have to upgrade the local electricity infrastructure. And they kind of passed that bill along to the heavy consumer, which kind of sucks from the miner's point of view, obviously. When it comes to all-coin mining, it's something that I'm personally... I was moving more away from all-coin mining, more towards Bitcoin mining, but I'm kind of pivoting back for a couple reasons. Personally, the Voscoin war chest has been heavily damaged from the fallout of FTX and BlockFi. Without going on a rant about that stuff, it really sucks. A big misstep. Obviously, most people didn't think that these things were going to blow up and implode, and that's caused me to ease off the gas a little bit, operate a little more conservatively, and I should say conservatively in exactly how much gear I'm deploying and how much I'm raising the electricity bill because that's a recurring bill every month and just this big recurring expense. Many of these all-coin miners are very profitable, but they mine relatively new and unproven cryptocurrencies. It's a double-edged sword when it comes to mining all-coins because you can mine them, you can dump them, and it's fun and profitable, but then you wonder why there's less and less minable coins every year. You wonder why these coins are struggling to gain price appreciation. If all you do are mine and dump all coins for Bitcoin or dollars, you're kind of a leech in that ecosystem, and I get it. I've pillaged some coins. I'm not trying to act like I'm just some hero coming around all the time, but you need to really think about how you can support these minable cryptocurrencies, join their communities, get involved in their ecosystem, maybe write a blog post on how to set up their wallet, create some tutorials, some engagement, some just add value to their ecosystem, make a video on how to mine their coin or something you find interesting. One thing I really like is going from generation to use. For example, I'm not here to push any specific coin. I don't even need to name them. Let's say we mine a crypto currency, and now we have these coins. They're also building some kind of EVM, like an Ethereum virtual machine competitor clone, whatever. What that is is DeFi. You have a decentralized exchange. We mine these coins on maybe they're multi-chain on layer one, and then we transfer it to their layer two. Then we can start engaging with decentralized trades, yield farming, liquidity mining, staking, buying into these new alt coins that are being born on their chain, and we get into their whole ecosystem. That's a really cool way to get your cost basis for these coins down to just whatever costs you basically through the miner and the electricity cost, your cost of generation. Then you can get involved in the ecosystem, and you may find it to be the most lucrative endeavor that you ever go on. You became a user, you became an advocate, you became someone creating content, just things of value for the ecosystem. I think if more people thought like that, crypto as a sector would just grow at a rapid pace. It would be exciting. I think when you work hard and you build anything of value, you make out decently, financially along the way. You become a builder, and builders should be rewarded. Even at a minimum, they're just early and then things get big and take off. Then in retrospect, there's huge price appreciation. It's not against traders. I trade too, but when it comes to crypto trading, you're not really adding value. You're siphoning value. If you make a trade and you win, somebody's losing somewhere. It's a bit of a mindset thing, something to think about. I'm a huge advocate and proponent supporter of alt coins, but I think that most alt coins are also still junk unfortunately. Trying to weed through the junk and finding any half decent projects is really the mission, the endeavor. Proof of work is a grassroots movement to distribute your coins. Economically, it's just incredible, I think personally. The security aspect is great as well. When you deal with proof of stake and tokens, it's very close, it's very centralized, and it takes a long time to be decentralized. There are some good mechanisms to do that these days. You have staking, you have liquidity mining. A lot of things kind of born and really revolutionized or advanced in the DeFi ecosystem. Web 3 mechanics will continue to kind of build in advance on that, but nothing really beats that first mover, grassroots, mine a coin. It shows someone bullish, willing to commit and support these projects. I think some of the strongest ecosystems are built out of mining. Even though Ethereum miners are cast aside, it's all those Ethereum GPU miners that really put eth on its back when all that was was just an ICO coin casino. It wasn't until years later that they really started to build out an ecosystem that was worth having, which would be things like DeFi. Yeah, I think the thing with altcoins is the product-to-market fit in terms of, is it a new solution that doesn't already exist within traditional finance and within crypto payment rails? Where is the usage also? There's a lot of great solutions. There's scalability is not an issue for a lot of blockchains. They're fast. They're secure. You could build dApps on them, but the issue is where are the users? What is the actual use case for it? Altcoins have the Achilles' Hill of just building products and solving problems for which solutions and products already exist and have saturation. What's your thesis on the upcoming Bitcoin halving? Do you think the market's going to follow the conventional route? Or is it a quote-unquote, this time it's different type thing? And have you had your eyes on the Litecoin halving, which is in like 264 days? Any thoughts about that? So I think that it'll, I think that personally, I think it'll be similar to the previous halvings. I think that it's going to be all crazy and exciting. We're going to all hype it up. We're going to build it up. It's going to happen. And then like not that much is going to happen. And then a couple months ago by, we'll get like a little bored. And then it'll start to creep up. And then hopefully like just global macro conditions are good. And then hopefully it goes ballistic and it really rockets up. That's my personal view. I think with the next halving, it'll actually start to become a negative event that there will be just true negativity and just rough conversations being born out of it. And then also just a lot of fud. And what exactly I mean by that is the sustainability of the security of the ecosystem when it's only emitting a couple, not even a couple coins in a block, right? No, like we're going to six and a quarter with the next, or three and three and a quarter with the next halving. And then let me just fact check myself so I don't sound stupid. Or no, it's three and an eighth. And so that takes place. I mean, that's crazy. It's only 138 days away. And so with the next halving, three Bitcoin and one eighth will be mined every block. After that, we're dealing with just one coin and some change being emitted per block. And so, you know, there's the worry of the 51% attack and things like that. And, you know, what we're going to have to deal with is Bitcoin is going to need to evolve to become more safe, because if anyone can successfully pull off an attack on Bitcoin, its credibility is done. It's done. It's too big. It's too valuable. There's too much money in it that if that is successfully attacked, and there's a lot of bad actors, for example, I don't get too conspiracy theorists, right? But who would love to see Bitcoin fail? Who gets so much more power if Bitcoin fails, right? This is supposed to be digital gold, financially liberating, things like that. If it can be abused and double spent, things like that, it's not a store of value. And that will plummet the price. So, you know, there's a lot more to that. But that's kind of how I feel basically next having I'm hyped. Having after that, I'm worried. So, yeah, that's I think a lot of people are worried about the current macro environment with interest rates rising to no end with inflation being a problem with investor sentiment and even institutional investor sentiment toward risk on and high volatility assets like cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin translated to muted inflows into the sector. I think people are weighing all these negatives which are in the forefront. You know, Bitcoin was born out of the financial crisis, and Bitcoin like other risk assets and stocks thrived from quantitative easing and the Federal Reserve printing money to no end, right? It's always been in an environment where the supply of money is expanding and interest rates were low. Those were beneficial to Bitcoin, and that's when the havings took place within that kind of like free flowing cash low interest environment. So, now as we enter a new era where liquidity is tight, it costs a lot to borrow money from banks and, you know, centralized entities, interest rates are high and it's hard to get them down. Interest rates are currently being consistently being hyped. What sort of impact might that have on the next having? So, I think that's weighing on people's mind, and we're in new territory. And when you look at previous on-chain data and like fractals and historicals on what happened leading into that having cycle, what happened after the having cycle, sure it's all valuable and serves as precedent, but I know, you know, smart investors will thinking, but is there the possibility that it could be different this time? Yeah, the one thing I've learned in crypto is that as much as you think you know, you still don't know anything for certain, and everything could point to like, it's definitely going up and then it dumps magnificently and you're just like, what is happening? Like the last seven times this happened, it pumped off that. But, you know, it doesn't mean we can just write everything off and just do whatever and not pay attention. You know, there's data, there's experience, there's everything you have to kind of weigh and, you know, you need to keep reviewing, refining, adjusting, evolving and all we can do is make the best decisions in real time with the data we have. And the conversation that we need to have that nobody wants to have is that the global macro situation is terrible. And the last couple havings, right, they were doing good times, generally speaking, financially, lower interest rates, inflation, not at recent record highs. We've got metrics you compare on the last century that make it look like we're about to hit the next great depression. And if we enter the next great depression, okay, Bitcoin is not going to be the first thing on people's agenda. And it sucks to say and realize and think about, and I think a lot of people in the cryptocurrency sector can get siloed in a crypto echo chamber. And I do think I have a really unique position, unfortunate that we have over 600,000 subscribers on the Bosco and YouTube channel. And some people are so deep into crypto and some aren't, right? We have a wide net, right? And I get so much feedback and so many opinions and, you know, some comments like, you know, they really kind of cut through the noise. And they're like, dude, like I'm not buying Bitcoin this month, eggs are up, milk is up, bread is up, like my grocery bill is through the roof. I need a new car, but I can't buy it because it's just not a good time, you know, put it simply because they keep raising interest rates, which goes to home values, it goes to car values, whatever, like, they're kind of worried about the day to day, their essentials, their food, their mode of transportation. And if you're so consumed in the day to day, you're not focused on investments. And Bitcoin is an investment, right? I mean, Bitcoin, it can be used, it's digital cash and things like that. But at the end of the day, especially in this era, people aren't buying Bitcoin to pay someone for something in another country, right? You're not ordering, you know, your A1 Wagyu beef with Bitcoin because you think it's a great peer-to-peer digital borderless currency. You're buying it because you hope it goes up. Maybe you think it's digital gold, whatever. And if you don't have any extra money, you're not buying Bitcoin. And that's super bearish. And the more everyone gets squeezed, the less of a just case we have for our risky asset class, which is what it is. I mean, I love crypto. I love blockchain technology. There's so many use cases. Web 3, you know, opens up a huge universe. Even just the application that can be applied in the billion trillion dollar gaming sector alone is insane. You know, so no matter what, with how big and wide crypto is as a whole now, there will be opportunities. But just a euphoric bull market gets further and further away as the global macro conditions worsen or simply stay bad. And, you know, it's a time of building and survival. And, you know, it's not an exciting thing to say. But I think, you know, the more grounded you are, the better decisions you'll make. Or even just understanding, you know, you get you load your bags with whatever coins, like be ready to bunker down for a couple of years, not a couple months. Yeah. Yeah. So pivoting to centralized finance and decentralized finance and the application of blockchain for everyday banking, which is something that you were just talking about. I know we all got our fingers burned by DeFi and CeFi. And now we know what was wrong, right? And we know about commingling and rehypothecation of assets and that these guys were like borrowing and lending from each other in a circular way, which was not sustainable. And that shows us that the yields that we were earning on our coins were not sustainable. It was all kind of fabricated and it was going to blow up eventually. And it did, right? But outside of that, do you think that in the future, there's still a use case for CeFi and DeFi, collateralizing assets, earning yield off of them, self banking by borrowing off of your assets? Is it a done and dusted type of concept because it didn't work and this one iteration or do you see any sort of future for CeFi and DeFi? So I think personally that lending, yield, and centralized entities is a complete, it just, it could have been done, my opinion, in a sustainable way. But it was basically turned up to 11, right? And like you said, like the circular movement of funds. And instead of earning a couple percent, we were earning a dozen percent, right? And with that, it proved that they lied, cheated, steal, or stole and just abused it, right? To the point, I think you're foolish if you ever hunt yield in centralized finance moving forward, specifically in the crypto sector. Like if you get into the next BlockFi, the next Gemini earned, the next Celsius, the next Voyager, whatever, you are set up for failure. And with enough bad events compounding that whatever that thing is, could implode. I think obviously we still need centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. We need fiat on and off ramps. And centralized exchanges, I mean, they're, the concept is great. I mean, it's something you can get rid of all the responsibility, right? They hold your coins, you use them to put your dollars in, you get your crypto in and it sits there, you don't have a private key, you got nothing to worry about. And, you know, when you're really deep into crypto, you bulk it that you're like, dude, I want my private key, I want to custody my coins. And I agree. And I feel that. But, you know, there are so many people that want crypto exposure, they want nothing to do with self-custody. And, you know, we just have this difficult dilemma where we need like some kind of like simple usable interface for self-custody onboarding and recovery of funds that doesn't basically just leave all your coins in someone else's pocket. We need proof of reserves. We need big, we need big trustworthy consistent audits. Like the space just has to get better and grow. It just has to get better and more transparent if it's ever going to grow. Again, when it comes to yield, I want nothing to deal with it personally. I'll use these exchanges to trade and fiat on off ramp, you know, I'm in and out. See you later. And with how many people that were burned on all this stuff, myself included, and just the magnitude of, you know, a scam in basically at a $10 billion level, it's you have to protect yourself and just be wise moving forward. Like not your keys, not your coins rings louder than it ever did before. And times were good for a while. And that led to a lot of complacency. And, you know, it sucks. A lot of people got, you know, messed up and burned by that. When it comes to DeFi, right, the DeFi side of it, we need transparency, we need audits, we need a clear understanding of what these funds are doing, where are they going, rock solid smart contracts, because there's no government entity coming to bail out anyone in centralized crypto finance. There's no government entity coming to bail out decentralized finance. And, you know, the rewards need to be appropriate because you can just park your money in your savings account right now and earn 4%. That used to be what we were earning in a lot of these centralized crypto exchange lending operations. Right. And guess what, I got FDIC insurance and I'm not trying to lean on the government, you know, and I don't like it, all that kind of stuff. But the fact is when you zoom out, right, I've got an essentially risk-free play versus an incredibly risky, unbacked play that in just the last month, we've watched so many of these dominoes fall. Money that you're owed nothing, you may get nothing back, you evaporate years of gains, maybe you lost all of your Bitcoin holdings, it's devastating, it's scary, it's tough, it's trying, and it will forever change the space or at least it better. Otherwise, we're just going to have a classic history repeats itself. Exactly. Those are all super valuable insights. And I agree. And yeah, it's interesting that you say you can earn more on treasuries now and in your savings account than you can in crypto. And, you know, what drew me to DeFi was the two, three, four, five, six percent yield. And of course it went all the way up to 12 and 20 percent and all that. So it's just interesting how the tables have flipped, right? Where now DeFi is offering under market return on investment versus what you can get from the government. So to wrap up, has this been the roughest year that you've ever experienced in crypto? Is it over? Is crypto done? Was this the last bull market ever? And what's the takeaway you want folks that are kind of new to the space to be aware of? So, 2018 bear market. It was my first bear market in crypto. I had only known good times. I had only known things going up. I had only known wins. And you take some losses, you wake up every morning and watch 10 percent of your net worth evaporate. It's devastating. It's devastating. It's scary. It's crippling. And you just want to get out. You just want to make the pain stop. And some coins will go down and never recover, which is a terrifying thing. That bear market was empty. It was long. It was cold. And we did wonder, is this it? At least I did. Some people will say they didn't. But let me tell you, I was there every day. We all wondered. Moving forward to this current bear market, which is the following bear market. It's much different. FTX and the associated contagion, very devastating. It blew a vital blow to me, among many others. A lot of bad things. I had dodged, skirted around, sheltered myself from, guarded against whatever. But that was a substantial blow. Dealing with these bankruptcy cases. It's honestly, it adds stress to every single day in my life, among obviously many others. And it just truly sucks. And to know, to watch like your either Bitcoin, especially like your blue chips, like your Bitcoin holdings, your Ethereum holdings, or profits you took into stable coins from those holdings that you're waiting for an opportunity to buy back in, or even just you want to sit in your profits, whatever your goal is, to watch that go up in smoke. And now you're dealing with a bankruptcy claim. That's, I mean, it's truly crippling. And that's something that didn't happen in the last bear market. Like no, no entity that mattered went bankrupt. Right. It's, we're talking crypto companies with billion dollar valuations, multiple. Chapter 11, that did not happen. You had all coins that just kind of faded away, fizzled out, didn't do something, whatever. Like that was the, the fallout. There's been so much investment into the crypto ecosystem in the last couple of years. There's so many projects being built. There's so many use cases. There's so much more just available code to fork that can be repurposed and built on into very new, exciting and useful things. I don't think that anyone can truly make a case to crypto's dead. Worst case scenario, it just changes form. Just like how Reddit took NFTs and like, dude, these aren't non fungible tokens. These are digital collectibles. These are avatars, my man. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Instead, the Reddit hive mind hates like NFTs, but they're all about the Reddit avatar collectibles that are their NFTs. That's a little bit of an aside, but you know, there's so many things that just have been proven that they work at least to any like a decent degree. Like NFTs are digital collectibles. Every digital item you should seek ownership of, right? You know, if you game on Steam and you have these digital games, they can ban your account. See you later to $1,000 or more of like your gaming collection, right? Too bad. See you later. But if those are NFTs sitting in your wallet, you had true ownership, you could sell them secondhand on a gaming marketplace, whatever. You know, and just that alone is enough of a use case for NFTs and digital ownership. You'll period, right? Decentralized trades are incredible, right? You make a trade with no intermediary, no KYC, nobody bothering you. You just do out there doing what you do, whatever you want to do. That's the dream. That's the goal. You're not, it's not that you have something to hide. Just privacy is freedom. Too many people forget that. So crypto is not going away by any means, but the global macro is very tough. And as we continue to deal with inflation and inflation and inflation, spare cash is tight. Spare cash turns into risky asset investments, which, you know, more or less is the crypto sector, at least, you know, a large piece of it. Furthermore, right? All crypto is priced trades against fiat currencies. So the less valuable and the less valuable, the less valuable the US dollar becomes, the less valuable a $20,000 Bitcoin becomes. A $20,000 Bitcoin in 2017 was so much more expensive than the $20,000 Bitcoin that was trading in 2022. Granted, you know, that happened for like a, it was actually like very high 19s in 2017, or like the first month of 2018. But what I'm trying to illustrate is the buying power of the dollar has diminished incredibly. And, you know, it's, which brings two things, right? The current day's Bitcoin is less valuable than last year's $20,000 Bitcoin. But it also sets us up for probable price appreciation for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, because they need to match the inflation rates to even just maintain essentially the same value. And, you know, we've seen so many just Bitcoin and crypto holders liquidate their stash because they had to, because maybe they had huge FTX or, you know, related entity exposure. And so they need funds, they need to dump these coins and do that. Or some of these coins are wrapped up in all that, and they're going to get liquidated. Or the other thing, you know, we talked about, especially early in this video, mining, all these Bitcoin mining farms, you know what they're going to do before they go bankrupt? They're going to sell every single Bitcoin they're holding, because a Bitcoin can turn into cash, which can service their debts and whatever else is dragging them down towards this bankruptcy black hole. Bitcoin miners have been selling more than ever before recently. And most of them have liquidated most, if not all, their BTC stashes, which then begs the final question, how much more selling can take place? If most of the selling is kind of taking place, then maybe we are poised for a big step up. So, you know, finally, you know, my takeaway is, you know, I'm here to stay. I've taken some pretty serious damage. I'm picking up the pieces. I'm moving forward. You know, I still believe in all of this. And crypto is just truly life changing for me. And I think it's just changing for the world. And it brings power back to the people. And that's really all you can ever ask push for and campaign for is, you know, if we can keep financials in our hands, we have so much power against government entities that ultimately just seek to control us and keep us under their thumb. So, hey, we'll see what happens. I'm going to keep fighting the fight. And I hope everyone watching does as well. Yeah. Hey, keep fighting a fight. Keep doing what you do, spreading the good word of Satoshi, right? I think when you get wrecked, okay, when you're in a bull market and you're flush with cash and, you know, cash is not an issue and everything's all profit, profit, profit, one gets complacent. And through that complacency, start to slip up and, you know, get caught out, you know, without a shirt on and make mistakes. And it's after getting wrecked that sometimes you're a little bit more focused and disciplined and hungry. And that hunger translates to ambition. And that ambition translates to work and research and re-optimizing and looking back at what worked well for you in previous bull cycles and where were there some inefficiencies and what needs to be re-optimized to come back stronger in that next step. So anyone that took on losses, including you, you know, if you do the math, you do the time and plan, you're going to 20X it all back, you know, fingers crossed. Now, nothing that Vosk and I discussed today is financial advice. We just talked strategy and some ideals related to the market, but Vosk does not intend and Cointelegraph and I do not intend for any of this to be interpreted as financial advice. You know, all listeners are always encouraged to do your own research and read the documents, check the chain, trust and verify, right? Make sure that you are doing that diligence before you invest your hard earned money into anything. So Vosk, Drew, I want to thank you for coming on it. You know, it's been good. You had a lot to say, a lot of valuable insights to take away. I like that you don't think the bull market is ending. Things are changing, new dynamics, new trends, new players will emerge, but crypto is not dead. You know, it's here to stay. I totally agree with you. And I like that you emphasize that not your keys, not your coins. So don't go chasing after yield. If you don't know where the yield comes from, you are the yield as good as it looks, right? Yeah, you just became a fruitless investor. Somebody's exit liquidity. That's right. So yeah, so thanks for coming on, right? Likewise. Yeah, we're here every Thursday at 12 o'clock Eastern and thanks to all the listeners for tuning in. And Drew, I hope to have you on again in the future. Let's talk, let's build, let's collaborate. Good luck to you. Absolutely. You too, Ray. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.