This is an abridged transcription of a Q&A session held by GAW Miners conducted on Oct 1st, 2014. The answers given to user submitted questions does not shed any further light on what an actual hashlet is. In fact, some of the responses indicate just how clueless they are. When asked what chips GAW Miners use, Josh Garza's behaviour is quite revealing.

Swindlers Josh Garza and Joe Mordica otherwise known as jizz moppers.

Josh Garza – So today I asked to put this call together as I thought it would be a good opportunity to address different questions that our community asks us all the time. We have one of the fastest growing forums in the world and we have one of the fastest growing products in the world and when you're in that position, you're consistently asked the same questions over and over again. We do the best we can to try to address them through our forum, through our newsletters but we thought maybe today we'd address them in a more personal way.

Josh Garza – We have hundreds and hundreds of questions submitted to us in just a couple of hours today and we're going to do the best we can to get through as many as possible. Before we start, one of the themes I want to create for this conversation is what GAW Miners is about. We started this company about 6 months ago and it grew pretty quickly. We started it because we saw a need in the industry for a company that operated a little bit differently and operated in a way that actually provides good customer support and service.

Josh Garza – Most of the people that have been around this industry for a long time have kinda had experience and legacy experience with different companies that sometimes wasn't as favourable. We got into it because we thought we could help to change that and along the way it's been a really really fun and interesting ride and our mission as a company has kinda developed and evolved, we stand in this industry to help grow and broaden the industry and so that's a lot of the theme of some of the questions we're going to go over today because I think that sometimes our users and customers don't understand what we're doing, it's often because we're not just thinking about the way the industry has always done it, we're thinking about the industry in the future and where we think things will go and what we think things will be because ultimately the only way that Bitcoin or any currency becomes more valuable is more people use it and the only way more people are going to use it is more people have to get more comfortable coming into the industry.

Josh Garza – Everything we do, everything we do, is about making new people feel comfortable coming to the industry. That's a difficult thing to balance when we're balancing legacy customers, you know, customers that have been with us for a long time that have supported our company to help us get here, but we think we're providing the best thing for our customers by focusing on the future and broadening the industry because that will allow us to sustain this business in the industry and be here for a long time which only benefits our legacy customers.

Question – Well the first question I had for you Josh was, I know, everyone is talking about right now but what I want to know, 6 months, 12 months down the line, where do you see, what is your vision for hashlets and how are they going to affect us in our daily lives.

Josh Garza – That's a great question. From my perspective, our goal as a company is all about allowing new users to come in by creating a seamless process for them. If you think about 6 months ago, 8 months ago, 12 months ago, we were putting gpus in egg crates and using zip ties and mining all these really cool new coins and then converting them and while that was a lot of fun, it takes a long time to learn and again it's not really conducive to people that don't want to spend the time to do that.

Josh Garza – Where I see things in 6 months is that, it's something that is so seamless that someone could become a miner with a couple of clicks and the profits and the gravity that they generate from that mining could go and purchase a product directly, where, you kinda complete the loop and bring it all the way down to the purchase, that's something I'm looking to do or to an investment which is something that we're also working on. So, you kinda close the loop and make it all into one system to make it really easy because we think that we need to be on both sides of the equation, both on the mining side and facilitating the purchase for the customer. One of the biggest problems I see in the industry as a whole is the limited amount of companies that accept Bitcoin and we've got a couple really cool things we're working on to change that because I think if we leave it to the companies, for them to accept it, we might be waiting a long time.

Josh Garza – We're working on some things that would make it to where the company doesn't need to have to accept it, it's something more innovative than just linking it to a debit card. Those are things we're going to be rolling out in the future but we see that as one seamless mining experience, that way, anyone who mines can ultimately end up with a product or an investment or something that they want without ever having to leave the stream they're in.

Joe Mordica – Yeah, I think that's good Josh and I would also add to that, one thing that is missing in this industry, currently, because of that maturity of it, but also it's just no-one has gotten to this point yet, the whole idea of unity. Having everything in one place, the social aspects, the community, real market graphs and numbers on one side and then your investment in the middle along with your hashlets and all of your property all in one place. So you know, I think if we bring all of these things together plus more, it just creates a much better customer experience if you look at how other companies, larger companies like Google, some of these other guys are very good at that.

Question – On to my next question which is I think, for the community at large, is one of the more exciting things that we've seen, various mock-ups of, is the GAW apparel, hashlets on a shirt, hashlets on a hat, when are we going to see the store?

Josh Garza – The first time you'll see apparel will actually be at the Vegas show next week. Much like everything we've done, we didn't want to just slap our logo on something, we worked with some really interesting merchandise manufacturers from all across the country to build some really premium.. essentially I looked at it and said like if I wouldn't wear it then I'm not going to sell it to anyone, so it took a long time for us to find something I would actually wear. We'll see that store come online for that in a few weeks but again, what I think is really cool is that part of our business is that it's just another example of getting mining and digital currency mainstream, where regular people, maybe some guy that really doesn't know anything about our business upfront might be walking around one day with one of our hats or shirts and maybe through that he might end up starting to join the industry.

Question – What is the prime buy back program all about and how soon will we get to sell the primes after we put it up for sale?

Josh Garza – I've seen a lot of questions about this being asked everywhere and the first thing I would say is that, like many things, it's not so black and white but the problem with the prime buy back program when we created it had to do with the way we stored miner profiles to begin with, you know, when we built them, while we had a vision of where we saw things going, I mean, if any company ever says they know exactly where things are going, there's no way, right? There's always change and things are going to come up that you don't predict, but there were things that happened that we didn't predict, our customers demanded a whole bunch of things from us that we thought were great ideas that we decided to implement and because of that, it kinda pushed us to use the original database structure in a little bit of a different way than we intended, so, specifically when it came down to merging and unmerging hashlets together and what happened was that the simplest solution at the time was to create new profiles every time that took place, the problem is that when you have a customer base of our size, getting millions and millions of hits a minute, the profiles just blew up, we just had too many.

Josh Garza – So essentially what we're doing now is we're rewriting our database that way a hashlet is a hashlet and then things like the speed and the algorithms are an attribute through the hashlet versus being something *inaudible* and so that's what has created the buy back problems because in order for a hashlet to be stored in the current scenario, a profile has to match another profile that the person's looking to purchase and that doesn't happen because there are literally tens of thousands of profiles and there's tens of thousands of ways that people can buy plus you've got customers that have configured them all different ways, it just creates mismatches all the time. So, we're in the process of implementing that, we've done things like fixes along the way to make the selling process faster but once we implement that completely then all hashlets will constantly sell because we still sell significantly more hashlets than go up for sale on our market, they're just not matching each other now. So that's going to be written in the next couple of days so if you're trying to sell your hashlet prime, just stick with it, you've waited this long and I appreciate it but give it a couple of more days for us to get our database finished, rewritten and you'll begin to see the primes sell like that *clicks fingers*

Josh Garza – Because ultimately, we want a user driven market that's driven by the community itself because that will then control the price and with the buying power we have as a company, that'll help us be able to manage the price of the hardware itself.

Joe Mordica – Yeah, it really just comes down to the evolution of code. In the beginning, like you were saying, we started off with hardware miners and creating miner profiles makes a lot of sense, when you get into adding upgrades and splitting and merging and all these fun things that we offer now, it really starts to complicate things, it forces you to relook at how the back end is written, you know, we're adapting.

Question – What kind of hardware do your scrypt data centres use. For example, which chips, manufacturers, etc

Josh Garza – What we can talk about is everybody, so, we quite literally use every major manufacturer in the world, so, bitmain, we're actually in discussions right now with bitfury, *inaudible*, I mean, every single company. We are in the process of beginning to build our own chip, we do have hardware that is not publicly available that created economies of scale for us, kinda all over the place, probably a less glamorous answer than you were looking for but we actually are putting the finishing touches on one of our biggest data centres yet in the next couple of weeks, I actually spoke to someone a few days ago who saw it and he's never seen that many miners and flash computers in one place.

Joe Mordica – Yeah, look for the litecoin graphs.

Question – What do you see happening in terms of Bitcoin price? Any wisdom or experience that you can share to calm them down about its poor value over the past month, where does it go from here and what factors play a role?

Josh Garza – It all comes down in my opinion to how many people use the currency. When it's limited to a very small fraction of the world then obviously like anything, it's going to be more susceptible to things like buying on margin, shorting and things like that. While the concept of it is decentralised, there are a number of central things that can drastically affect the price that I think in time will go away as it becomes more widely adopted. Adoption's the big deal. What gives me hope is not seeing Bitcoin go up to 700 and then go back to 500, it's seeing guys like Overstock, airlines and companies that accept it as a currency because that gets it into the hands of normal consumers and you know, normal consumers have more buying power than any company in the world. That will help for a stable Bitcoin price.

Question – Given the fact that GAW has become so popular worldwide over the last 6 months or so, now there is a huge variety of cloud mining services available to the general public, do you believe that GAW can still remain profitable at the same time as continuing to provide a solid avenue towards ROI, if so, how do you plan to achieve this?

Josh Garza – We innovate, that's what we do. I was talking to our developers because they are a little down due to some of the bugs, I know our customers have been frustrated, one of the things I told them, I mean this in the most positive way, at least we have bugs because it means that we're doing something, we're actually innovating whereas a lot of our competitors don't have bugs because they don't change, they don't do anything different and while we don't want bugs in the future and we're still learning that process, just like we had to learn hardware mining, we're always going to be innovating and doing something new for our customers to keep them excited, to keep them on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next thing to change the experience that they have in the industry. We think that we've got a pretty good lead on our competitors, we hope there is more competition in the space because unfortunately some times the only way you can create a true comparison with our company a lot of times is like apples and oranges cause there's really no one close to some of the things we're doing, by the time our competitors catch up to us, we'll be months and months ahead of them. We hope that that changes, the more companies that are competing, the more people will come and be a part of it, we're along for the ride so we're eagerly awaiting some competition.

Question – Do you ever feel that you release futures too soon based on consumer pressure and do you realise that many of us see *inaudible* as oil drilling, gold mining, timber harvesting and etc so that there will be ups and downs but we look for continuity, direction and stability as the deciding factor in investing in a company.

Josh Garza – That's a great question. I would answer that 2 ways. When I first started, I measured everything by the numbers, so, a lot of companies look at forums, specific conversations and freak out, I look at the numbers because numbers never lie, you can tell through patterns and numbers, so, I remember when we first started, if we had a bad sales day we freaked out, we've gotta do something about it, we've gotta react. We've learnt over time is that, everything stays pretty steady in our business and when something changes, give it some time before we react, the way this industry works, it often will adjust itself back again.

Josh Garza – To the specific question, yeah we definitely, we're doing one week spread so a lot of pressure on the developers. We definitely came here today to also say we're learning this process the same as we learned to sell miners. We use to ship them out with no cables or power supply, I'm not proud of that but none of us are e-commerce guys, we just got into this space because we thought we could make a difference.

Josh Garza – Our system has gotten incredibly complex, I remember when we got our first 1000 customers, we're doing that a day now so everything has changed and grown exponentially. For us, it's always going to be a curve, as we innovate, we'll start catching things and perfecting the process and then something will happen, a new technology, something like that will come out and it might get a little bumpy. In general, if you've been with us for the whole ride, I think things have always gotten much better and that will continue to happen.

Joe Mordica – Like Josh said, we do take around 10 million requests per day, not counting real time IO connections, you count those and we're close to around 100 million requests per day on our web services and that's 200 OK messages, we're scaling well, very minimum down time and we're learning just like we had to do when we started shipping product, I can see improvements on our end and also see how we can improve in future whenever we do releases and do proper QA.

Question – How did you get into mining and crypto currencies *inaudible*?

Josh Garza – There's a lot of reasons we got into the business, the main reason always being we believe that we can make a difference and stop companies and individuals that took advantage of others and that, you may not know, last year when this whole KNC, Jupiter thing was actually when Joe and I started getting into the mining business, we thought it was pretty cool, I remember telling him, one day it'd be so cool to build products like this. KNC, just like us, has had challenges and we respect them as a company and they really innovated towards the beginning and drew more people into the industry so we looked at their products and thought man, it'd be really great to build something like this but towards the end of the year, I actually fell into one of the difficult *inaudible* new products, and like Christmas, I was waiting for my Jupiters to show up and they never showed up, I remember I was devastated, a range of emotions, I can't believe this is happening, this is embarrassing, why would I send money to someone, all that stuff, truthfully I came from a different industry where people don't do things like that, my guard was down and I wasn't really thinking that way, you go through a range of emotions and I got really angry, I concluded that the folks that did this wouldn't of cared and that made me really upset because I knew that must've happened to a bunch of other people. I made a list of companies and individuals that I wanted to see not operate any more, that were well known that did these sorts of things, so we set up shop and every one of them kept dropping, like anything, if you run your business well and with integrity, eventually that's what prevails. We really started it because we wanted to stop those sorts of things happening in the industry and I think we've been pretty successful with that.

Joe Mordica – The first thing that came to mind was I can't believe we spent $20,000 on a Jupiter. I just remember the first day that we decided to launch and it was the first day we decided to build a website, it's 10am and I said hey let's do this, we literally put together a website at 10pm at night, what's that?

Josh Garza – Truthfully, it was 9am and I called you and said Joe, we should build a website, do you think you can get it done in an hour?

Joe Mordica – Of course, it ended up being done at 10pm, made a post on bitcointalk, sold our first $20,000 and looked at each other and said how in the world are we gonna do this?

Josh Garza – Why buy from us? *laughs*

Joe Mordica – It was a very interesting day.

Question – What is your forecast for Bitcoin mining in the next 5 years and the number of people you think it's going to reach?

Josh Garza – Oh man, it's hard to think sometimes past 2 months or even 6 months. Obviously in 5 years we hope to see Bitcoin become a mainstream currency, people bumping their phones with each other and transferring money. I believe in everything that Bitcoin stands for, I believe in the concept of decentralisation, small or no fees, things like that. No matter what government tries to control, there's always going to be a need for it, the public will demand it, I don't think it's going anywhere and I hope in the next 5 years you'll be using Bitcoin to pay for things the same way you would a credit card.

Question – What are your long term goals for GAW for the next 5 to 10 years.

Josh Garza – Right now, to keep from selling the company. When you've grown as quickly as we have, you're constantly courted by different groups but we want to control the company and deliver on the mission that we've got. Ultimately, we hope in the next 4 or 5 years or so, doing the same thing albeit in a totally new and different and better way.

Question – As we move forward, what can the community to help GAW Miners become more successful?

Josh Garza – I'd say 2 things, continue to demand more from us, don't let us rest, don't let us get complacent. I believe that we have to earn the right to be where we are every day. We are one of the biggest cloud mining platforms in the world and we'll only stay that way if we continue to innovate and we do right by our customers. Continue to hold us to the highest standards.

Joe Mordica – I would just like to add to what Josh said, in the very future, we're planning to have a small group of community members be involved in the QA process of our software, this will allow more interaction with our customers, we'll be putting something together for that and sending it out to hashtalk pretty soon.

Final Word

Josh Garza's demeanour when asked questions that require a specific answer is very telling in that he stumbled at first. For someone allegedly involved in cloud mining, he is not adept at answering hardware related questions. Not only that, when asked what scrypt hardware GAW Miners use, his response included hardware from Bitmain¹, Bitfury and then as a catch all, he claimed GAW Miners "quite literally use every major manufacturer in the world" as well as "hardware that is not publicly available". Smoke and mirrors much?

As if aware that these piss poor answers he concocted on the spot are obvious lies to anyone watching, he apologised for a "less glamorous answer than you were looking".

Josh Garza and side kick Joe Mordica² are indeed jizz moppers supreme.

1. which won't have scrypt hardware available until December 2014 ↩

2. who also calls himself Jim something else in the introduction ↩