Kevin Goes Big on Bitcoin

This collection of stories takes place from 2013-2015, when crypto was catching on but still not really mainstream. The Kevin in this story was my boss, who ran a large mining pool, as well as a datacenter full of ASICs, and a small team of people.

1. Kevin started the pool by paying 15% above standard PPS payout as a way to entice people to join the pool, thinking it would ultimately attract enough miners to the pool to sway the network in our favor and make it work out. Even if you don't understand the specifics of Bitcoin, it's pretty obvious to anyone that you can't pay out 15% above normal returns in the long term. Somewhere something is missing. Ultimately the end of this was a bunch of pissed off miners owed money they would never get.

2. As if things weren't already doomed, we had an instance where the pool wallet was "hacked" and we lost some coins. Turns out if you don't put a password on a crypto wallet, it's not hard to access it's funds. But Kevin "didn't know about wallets." Mind you at this point actual millions had been invested in ASICs and data center space as well as employees, travel, etc. The logic being that since Kevin had some moderate success in email marketing, he would do great at Bitcoin mining and running a pool.

3. Kevin stored all his passwords for all the wallets, backend servers, etc. in a keeper on his phone. The phone however, did not have a password. Kevin took said phone on a trip to China. His plan was to just show up and find a chip maker that would make ASIC chips for us based on his specs. He somehow decided it would be a good idea to have a rep from one of the less reputable, more questionable ASIC makers to host him and take him around. When he got back, a few days later he told us all he had lost his phone. Did not bother to cut it off, change any passwords, etc. So once again, massive funds go missing from the pool wallet and it's not a hack because they have the friggin credentials.

4. We reached a point where the original ASICs were obsolete and needed to be replaced. There were several options. The cheapest option was one we'll call White Spear, because they were known to overheat and catch on fire. Not rumored, known. Vids of early units were everywhere. So in spite of the majority of the team advising against this, Kevin "couldn't resist a good deal." He also listened to the one member of the team also worthy of the title Kevin (Kevin2 had made travel arrangements for the entire team to have a booth at a conference and made arrangements for the conference booth himself. He somehow booked his own ticket for a week later and missed the event). In spite of that, Kevin still listened to Kevin2 on the subject of the ASICs.

As best as I can recall, they were powering up the 3rd unit when the first one caught on fire, and so forth. They stopped around 10 units, leaving the other 200+ on the shipping pallets. The company we had purchased them from stopped returning any calls, leaving us to negotiate with AmEx since we had used a Black Card to buy them.

The problem is that the vendor we purchased from never paid White Spear, so as far as White Spear was concerned they were considered stolen and we had them.

The best part is that the guy who stole the phone in China and took all the coins from us was from White Spear.

I get that you need to understand a bit about crypto for this to make sense. But if you do you can see why this little collection definitely belongs in Stories About Kevin.