Mitchell Weijerman Podcast Transcript
Mitchell Weijerman joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Mitchell Weijerman Epic Mining founded by CEO Mitchell Weijerman is a leading Bitcoin mining company managing 80,000 hydropower machines with 80,000 machines under management across three locations, 450 plus happy customers, a real time performance dashboard, and approximately 57 percent green energy.
And 80 percent technical staff members, the company makes Bitcoin mining easy, accessible and profitable for investors worldwide with no technical know-how required offering daily automated payouts.
Well, good afternoon, Mitchell. Welcome to the show!
Mitchell Weijerman: Thank you!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time. I just love these international podcasts, but you’re based originally from the Netherlands, spent some time in the U.S., but now you’re in Bali, Indonesia, which is amazing. So again, appreciate you making the time big time difference here, but certainly love it. So, Mitchell, let’s jump into your first question here.
What inspired you to start Epic Mining? And how did you identify the opportunity in Bitcoin mining that led to the establishment of your company?
Mitchell Weijerman: Yeah. Great question. To give you a little bit of backstory, before I started Epic Mining, I was working in a Silicon Valley. I had the typical corporate life.
I was working for a company with a hundred thousand plus employees. I worked super hard to get that job. In the end, I felt totally unfulfilled by it. So, I decided to become an entrepreneur. And I spotted that the online education industry in the Netherlands in the U S in particular was really kicking off.
I always look for proven models and I like to introduce them to a new market. So, when I saw all of the success that the online education space had, especially around the topic of making money online. I started to do some research in the Netherlands and I figured there was pretty much no one in the Netherlands speaking about how to make money on the internet.
So, it also has to do with our culture because in the Netherlands we’re very I would say conservative. People don’t really like to talk about money. That’s kind of a private topic. It really hits people’s, um, ego when you do talk about money. So, we kind of decided to break that taboo. We build an online education platform where we taught people how to grow their e commerce businesses.
This became a huge success because we were the first movers in the market. There was a lot of interest and I had two business partners. And the thing with business partners is in the beginning, it’s like a, a beautiful relationship. It’s like, you’re in love. Everything is amazing. You compliment each other.
But unfortunately, after three years, we were not on the same page anymore. My two business partners didn’t want to work anymore. And I wanted to 10X, a 100X a company go international. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. So, after a few hearts. Conversations. I decided to sell my shares and to embark on a new journey.
And for one year, I was trying to figure out what my next big move was going to be because I wanted to do something bigger and bolder than my previous company. But it was tough when you sell your company, it’s like a blessing and a curse at the same time, because yeah, you do make a good amount of money when you sell your company, but you need to reinvent yourself again from scratch.
So, I think it took me a year of soul searching, figuring out what I wanted to do. And then one afternoon I was sitting at on a terrace with some friends and we were talking about investing. And one of my friends pulled out his phone and he told me that he was mining Bitcoin and he was just a normal guy, very artistic, very creative.
And I thought that Bitcoin mining was not possible anymore for the average person. Yet this guy in front of me was doing it. So, I figured if you can do it, then I can probably do it too. So that evening I went to my bedroom, I locked myself up and I studied how to get started with Bitcoin mining. And as a true millennial that I am, I opened up YouTube and I started to watch some videos, but.
I couldn’t comprehend what these guys were saying. Like there were a ton of super technical guys that were bragging about their homemade mining rigs at home. And my mind was just, I know it couldn’t comprehend as if they were talking a different language. So, I just sold my company, and I had some money in my bank account.
So, I decided to take a different path. I decided to just take. What was it around the time, a hundred thousand dollars, which is a big amount of money, but for me at that point, it was big enough that if I would crack the code with mining, it would be substantial enough for me to make an impact on my life.
And if I would lose it, then my life. Would not be over. So, I bought my first few machines and then I made an Excel sheet, and I researched different countries to place my machines, and you look primarily at like electricity costs. So, on top of the list of countries with lowest electricity costs was Venezuela and Venezuela…I’m not sure if you’re following the news, but almost practically every crisis you can imagine is in Venezuela. So that was. Of course, not the country where I placed my investment. So, I went a bit further down the sheet and that’s when I discovered Kazakhstan. Most people don’t know anything about Kazakhstan.
They only know the movie Borat, which is sort of a parody on Kazakhstan. It’s not even filmed in Kazakhstan. It has nothing to do with Kazakh culture. It’s just yeah funny comedy. But Kazakhstan is a country with so much natural resources. In fact, in the West of Kazakhstan, there is so much natural gas that It is very expensive once you drill in the soil, and you extract gas from the soil to stop the extraction process.
So what people do that they burn the excessive gas, they call this flaring. So I went to Kazakhstan, I started networking and I happened to roll into a group of friends which were mining Bitcoin there. And we started to become good friends, business partners. And we found one of these gas fields in the West of Kazakhstan.
And we made a deal with, with them. And we told them instead of you burning your gas, why don’t you allow us to buy it from you at a low rate? And then we can put a turbine onto it and generate electricity to mine Bitcoin. And this is exactly what we’ve done within a short period of time. We had 20, 000 Bitcoin mining machines, our own power plant, our own gas field.
And yeah, all of my friends started to ask me like, Hey, Mitchell, what do you do nowadays? And I told them I am mining Bitcoin. Luke, this is my mining dashboard. These are some videos of my farm and people were shocked again. They were like me listening to the guy that introduced me to mining. Everyone thought they missed the boat yet.
I was mining Bitcoin and doing it in a very profitable way. So, I got a lot of questions from the people around me asking, Hey, can I also do this? How can I get started? And after hearing the question for a hundred time, I organized a zoom call, invited everyone, explained them how mining worked and offered them to buy the machines on their behalf and ship them to the mining facility where we would manage everything for them.
And this organically grew very rapidly. And that’s how my new company, Epic Mining came into existence.
Brian Thomas: Wow. That’s amazing. I appreciate the story on that. Mitchell, obviously you went through a lot as an entrepreneur early on. Learned from the school of hard knocks, but then really, we’re very passionate and very committed to this Bitcoin mining, which I think is an amazing thing.
And we’ve all dabbled in that a little bit, including here. And we’re a web three platform as well. So, we support crypto, we support the whole blockchain ecospace. So, appreciate the share and Mitchell, if you could briefly share one of the key features of epic mining is making Bitcoin mining accessible to investors with no technical know-how, how have you simplified the process and what tools or services do you offer to ensure a seamless experience for your customers?
Mitchell Weijerman: Yeah, sure. Let’s start with the basics first. When you want to mine Bitcoin, you need a few things. You need access to cheap electricity. So, most people don’t have access to cheap electricity at home. So that’s the first thing that you need. The second thing is you need to have the technical know-how. So, you need to understand what machines you need to purchase.
You need to understand how to install those machines, how to connect them, how to do maintenance. And then the third thing is you need to have the right connections in order to purchase and ship those machines where they offer cheap mining machines and you’ll transfer your money there and they’ll never provide anything and you’ll never hear anything back from them.
So, a lot of people have lost money that way. So, the way that we make mining accessible for the average investor is we offer a plug and play system. So, we have a few mining facilities around the world. Our latest one is in Ethiopia, which is one of the fastest growing economies of the past 20 years. If you Google it, there will be a ton of articles out there.
I believe the financial times has this really great ranking, but for us, there’s a lot of opportunity in Ethiopia. There’s a seven biggest hydro dam, which is generating. Almost 10,000 megawatts of cheap green electricity, where we have a mining farm, which has place for 50,000 mining machines. And what we do is every month we do an analysis of what the best machines are on the market, put that into an ROI forecasting model.
And we share that with people that are interested and we educate them on how the mining process works. And then we offer them to buy one of those machines or. Few of those machines and ship them to our mining facility where we will manage everything for them. It’s a completely automated process. All they need to do is pay for their energy invoice once a month, or this could even be changed to quarterly or yearly.
And we’ll connect the machines to their Bitcoin wallet of choice, and then they receive automated payouts. And that’s our plug and play system. Basically.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I like how you are leveraging some of the, some of the energy sources on the inexpensive side from around the world, but also green energy, which is always a plus.
So, I appreciate that. And Mitchell Bitcoin is known for its price volatility. How does Epic mining help its customers navigate this volatility? And what advice do you offer to investors looking to capitalize on Bitcoin’s potential during market fluctuations?
Mitchell Weijerman: Yeah, there’s a few things. So, if you would go on the internet and you would search whether Bitcoin mining is profitable or not, Then most articles will tell you that it’s not profitable, but it’s just because most people that are writing those articles don’t understand how to make mining profitable.
Of course, the electricity price is a very big component of it. So already, you know, we have Around six times lower than the, than the electricity rate, the average electricity rate in Europe. I think we also have around three times lower than the average electricity rate in the U S. So that is one big component, but what is also important to understand is that the prices of Bitcoin mining hardware are correlated to the sentiment in a crypto market, meaning that when the bull market starts, the prices of these machines tend to go up very rapidly. And in the bull market, that’s usually when the retail investors, the average Joe wants to get into Bitcoin mining. So, they buy a very overpriced Bitcoin mining machine.
And then Of course, as people in the crypto space know, the bull market is of a very limited time. So, when you buy very expensive equipment, then maybe you have one or around one year, maybe a little bit longer to mine at a very high Bitcoin price. And then there will be a market correction again. And this is the absolute worst strategy to start with mining within the mining community.
We have something that we call the buy low mine high strategy, which means that you buy the machines. When the sentiment is absolutely terrible. When nobody wants to get into Bitcoin, when everyone is telling you to get out, to sell your positions, by the way, this is not financial advice. I’m just telling how we tend to do this.
So, we buy it when the market is, is bloody, when people are fearful, because that’s when you can buy machines at absolute bargain prices. And then you hold onto those machines. Well, during the next few months, maybe a year, Your ROI of those machines will not be great, but when the bull market starts to kick in, that’s when the cashflow from those mining machines really starts to skyrocket.
So that’s what we call buy low, mine high. You take advantage of the fluctuations in the price of the mining machines. You buy when they’re low, you hold onto them. And during the bull market, that’s when you get the biggest cashflow with your machines. And then secondly, the most important thing that you should understand.
Is that when you are mining Bitcoin, it’s very tempting to think like, what is the ROI of a mining machine today? Like how much Bitcoin can it produce? And what is the value of that Bitcoin compared to my energy bill? That is the wrong way to think about it. Let me tell you why most people hold on to their Bitcoin until later in the bull market cycle, because you would be foolish to sell your Bitcoin right now at a lower price.
It’s much better to hold onto it and sell it at a higher price. So instead of thinking, what is the ROI today? If I would cash out my Bitcoin, you should make certain scenarios for yourself. Like what is my lower estimate? What is my middle estimate? And what is my high estimate for the price of Bitcoin?
And what would my ROI be when I would sell my Bitcoin at these scenarios? And when you do this exercise, then you really start to understand the power of Bitcoin mining.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I know you’re not giving financial advice, but I really appreciate you breaking that down for our audience as a crypto enthusiast myself, I’ve done a lot of investing in different cryptos, including Bitcoin. And so, I love this stuff, but I’m glad that you were able to break this down in a simplified way for our audience today. Really do appreciate that Mitchell and Mitchell last question of the day. If you could briefly share as a CEO of a leading Bitcoin mining company.
How do you see the future of Bitcoin mining evolving, particularly with increasing regulatory scrutiny and advancements in mining technology? What is Epic mining strategy to stay ahead in this rapidly changing landscape?
Mitchell Weijerman: Well, a few years ago, I think it was around 2009 Tesla and Elon Musk started to accept Bitcoin payments or Tesla cars.
And this lasted for around one year. Afterwards, Elon Musk and the board of Tesla decided to stop these Bitcoin payments because according to them, Bitcoin miners were using non green sources of energy or primarily non green source of energy like gas, coal, and other renewable sources. Now, four years later, if you look at Bitcoin mining, we are at almost 56% green energy, which is amazing.
That is, it is one of the greenest industries in the world. And if I look at epic mining in particular, we use 100% green energy. I told you that my story of mining started in Kazakhstan, where we used gas. But nowadays we are mining primarily with energy generated by hydro dams. And our team is constantly monitoring the globe for opportunities where we can find cheap sources of green energy, which we can use to mine Bitcoin.
So, I think green energy is going to be really important and also the educational part. So, I’m very vocal on the internet. I try to share. Everything I know about Bitcoin, about mining, and my goal is really to make this as easily comprehensible by the average person, because usually it’s just a lack of understanding and information that is holding people back from truly unlocking the power of this industry.
So, we’re very heavy on educating people around us. And finally, what makes Epic Mining so strong is we are not a company which is VC backed where we raised a bunch of money from investors. We didn’t start with a hundred-million-dollar investment, or we don’t have BlackRock that is giving us access to large amounts of money.
We were able to grow big so fast because we understand the power of a collective. So right now, we have 450 customers or basically investors that are mining with us. And because we are pooling together our capital, we are able to buy machines at a very big discount. And as a result, we can bring down our costs and we can also negotiate the best electricity rates.
And as a collective, we can maximize our profits versus if you as an individual would start mining at home, you would buy your mining machines at top dollar prices. You would have very expensive electricity at home. You would not be able to make mining very profitable by yourself. And that’s why together we’re much stronger than we are as just divided individuals.
And that is the power that we’re harnessing with Epic Mining.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And thank you. You kind of wrapped up the podcast with that last question around the advancements around the mining and the ways that you’re leveraging lower cost on the energy, which is a great thing for the entire world. So, I appreciate that.
And Mitchell, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Mitchell Weijerman: Amazing. It was a pleasure being on here and so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Mitchell Weijerman Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
