Interview with Tim Barbir from North Georgian Data
On the world digital mining summit 2018 in Georgia, we met Tim Barbir, who is currently leading a miniing farm in America.
- Firstly, could you please introduce yourself.
- Yes, my name is Tim Barbir, I am from Georgia, the different Georgia, the state. I’m leading a project right now, we have 15 and a half megawatts in development in the North Georgian area in the US and we have over a 115 megawatts of a quickly actionable capacity that we’re looking to bring online within the next eight to twelve months. This is the part of the reason why we are here on this summit. I mean, we love Blockchain, we love cryptocurrency and we are very excited to help bring that capacity and just keep going.
- What’s the situation like in the US generally? What prices do you get for the electricity, is it cheap, is the political situation alright?
- That’s a very good question. I can only speak from my experience and from my experience my company is in a very unique position: we are the first cryptocurrency company to be approved by the power company to go into Georgia, brand new, at no cost. So we have one of the best rates in the country and the power company is very excited to serve us. We have built value with what we’re doing and they’re excited for bringing crypto in Georgia.
- Good luck. Is it the state-wise the situation like this, you know the political wheel, or is it nationally the same situation in the US?
- I think that it’s two-fold, I think nationally, there is policies that help shape crypto in the United States, but there’s also differences state to state. You know, not every state has cheap power and not every state has laws that are favorable to cryptocurrency mining, so you know, nationally I think there’s a lot of support, our government is working on improving and understanding the cryptocurrency laws and so I think overall it’s very positive and it’s moving forward.
- So what are your long-terms plans? Are you planning on expansion?
- Absolutely. Our long-term plan is taking our prototype and deploying it all over the world, so we’re not just stuck in the United States, we’re interested in countries like Georgia and other places around the world where there’s access to cheap power, so that we can offer our customers geographically distributed solution.
- Everybody in the crypto market is affected by the current market situation. How do you cope with it?
- I think it is a really good question. We have coped with it by really making sure that our business model is very cheap to operate, and so instead of putting money in our pockets we have passed that savings onto our customers and that’s why we offer retail pricing, no miner minimums for only 6.9 cents for kilowatt/hour. There’s no setup fees, there’s absolutely no maintenance fees, nothing at all. And that’s very important to smaller miners like someone who has 1 or 10. Because he cannot afford to take a loss to month to month and so with somebody like me he can be profitable whereas with many other hosting companies he’ll have to turn off his equipment and go out of business.
- And that brings us to the final question: what would be your recommendations to medium and small farms from 100 to 1,000 miners?
- I have two recommendations: learn to build value with your infrastructure providers, like I have done locally in Georgia US. The crypto industry as a whole has failed to show how the infrastructure providers, even the smallest ones, can benefit from cryptocurrency mining, and so I think that as an industry, we can show the world that there really is value aside from making ourselves rich, that this could absolutely revolutionize the world.