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In yet another installment of Women of BSV interviews with BSV leaders, the group caught up with the founder of Orion & Taurus, Alex Hays. Hays shared his fond memories of the Bitcade Miami event he attended last April in their recent chat.
A [former] sailor by heart, Hays told the Women of BSV that the onset of the pandemic in 2020 affected his sailing profession, with most international shippings coming to a halt because of travel restrictions. While he looked for a transition, his father had casually asked him to “look into the Bitcoin thing,” more as an investment asset, Hays said.
“The more we dived into it, the mining economics, we thought as long as it’s giving us more in return than the electricity bill, it is profitable,” he revealed.
Hays told the Women of BSV that his company started as a test pilot project as he built a 6×6 data center in his garage at home and started mining there. “But the building aspect of it drew me the most towards Bitcoin mining.” Orion & Taurus is one of the longest or oldest members of GorillaPool, Hays said. His business acknowledges that BSV is the right fit for them because they see the profits and understand that it is a good system and it is designed to last.
“It was around the same time when we found out about GorillaPool that we got associated with the BSV community. We like BSV enterprise blockchain enabling use cases, scalability, and hence we moved all our bitcoin hash onto the GorillaPool,” he said.
According to him, Orion & Taurus is currently working on building another data center in the United States. Deals are in an infancy stage right now but are likely to materialize soon.
Mining & power consumption
The conversation later dived into different kinds of powerful processors used in the process of mining: ASIC and GPU. Hays shared his insights about both with the group, pointing out that ASIC is an app-specific processor, and it does only one thing at a time.
He said ASIC processors are the cheapest one can buy for block reward mining, adding that they are restrictive, though.
“Because ASIC eliminates all other processing powers, it enables the most efficient way of mining; GPU on the other hand, you can program it to do different things,” Hays described.
When asked whether he’d like to engage in mining outside of the BSV community, Hays said:
“Yes, one can become a miner and make more money in the BTC network, but do I personally want to do that? No.
“In our crypto universe, the community outside of BSV has a lot of scams going on, so knowing who to trust is very, very important. Your infrastructure partner is also very important. Most of my power equipment is hashing away in Maryland, so finding the right deal is the key. Sharing one of the experiences.”
Hays told the Women of BSV that his company had a co-location mining facility in Colorado. Everything was going well until he found out that the facility was evicting Orion & Taurus’ miners one day.
“If you don’t know your infrastructure partner, you have a high chance of being evicted because there might be another party offering the facility for a lot more money than you, so you are always at their mercy. Protecting your infrastructure is very important,” he noted.
Recycling hardware
Orion & Taurus offers solutions where people can send them their miners, and they can deconstruct them and recycle some parts of older units whose economics don’t make sense for repair. There is another service related to chips if they could be reused, Hays said, adding that the company then tries to find the right people to send those chips to, so those materials can be recycled.
“This part of the business wasn’t a profitable issue, rather more focused on identifying how to create more value in our business and differentiate ourselves,” he stated.
GorillaPool
The company runs a full-listing node with data hardware at Ft. Lauderdale in Miami, which is being moved onto GorillaPool, so it can be used for better purposes.
“And we are going to move to a data solution center in Miami. GorillaPool has plans that entail using our hardware, and we are excited to help them with that,” Hays said.
How is the experience mining on GorillaPool? “GorillaPool offers the much-needed service within the BSV community, as they are creating more competition in the mining space. Major [7 or 8] node operators exist in the BTC world, such as Slush Pool, Marathon, etc. They collect the hash and are quite powerful when it comes to running nodes.
“BSV has less than one percent of ASIC, so we need to get in there and gain more power. TAAL (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF) is working on it, but it requires competition. The lack of competition in hash power within the BSV community is a hindrance,” Hays answered.
Hays noted that the opportunity here is that the more Orion & Taurus works on GorillaPool, the stronger GorillaPool gets and the more rewards one can get.
“Gorilla Pool will end up benefitting TAAL because of the competition,” he remarked.
In summary, Hays pointed out that he wants to draw attention to the hardware side of things because few people talk about it in the BSV community.
“When we build our data centers, we want to build them for multiple purposes. For instance, the excess heat coming from miners could move into grow houses. We could transition from boilers used for central heating with ASIC power. We could mine Bitcoin and use the excess heat to provide central heating to a big city like New York,” he concluded.
Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention panel, Blockchain mining & energy innovation
https://youtu.be/RzSCrXf1Ywc?t=24114
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