Brian Snyder, CEO of Kaboomracks, took the stage at Mining Disrupt Miami 2022, recorded on July 26–28, 2022, with a presentation that would not load. He told the room he was having technical difficulties and was going to "totally wing this at this point." The title of his talk promised one weird trick to double your mining profits, and he apologized for the click bait right away. The one-word answer was Kaboomracks. The real subject was the set of services the company had built so that used mining hardware arrives working and keeps working.
At the time of the session, Bitcoin was trading at $21,268. Today it is $83,426. The price has moved a long way since that Miami stage, but the problems Snyder described, used machines that arrive broken, boards wrecked by cold air and miners that are not ready for immersion, are mechanical problems rather than market problems, and his talk is a plain account of how one marketplace set out to handle them.
Surviving the Third Bear Market
Snyder introduced himself as a bear market survivor on his third downturn and asked the audience how many had been through one, then how many had been through two. He said it gets better by the third. Asked what advice he had for people in their first bear market, he said not to pull out too much hair, that they had not made the wrong choices, and that the market would come back given a little time.
you're not wrong you're just early and sometimes being early makes you feel like you're wrong
Brian Snyder · 0:44
He and Robert Van Kirk, who founded the company, had been running mining operations since 2014, and Snyder said that experience is what shaped Kaboomracks. The marketplace was founded to make sure customers had a good buying experience, especially with used hardware, because too often the alternative ends in a pile of machines nobody can fix.
The Broken Hardware Problem
Snyder asked how many people in the room had bought used equipment directly from China or from another vendor. The usual outcome, he said, is that the shipment comes in and about half of it does not work, and the buyer is left with a headache and no way to deal with it.
there's too many experiences where people end up with a lot of broken mining equipment and they just don't have the resources to fix it
Brian Snyder · 1:50
Kaboomracks built its infrastructure to prevent that outcome, and Snyder said the company had spent several years cleaning, repairing and refurbishing used hardware. For a buyer, the advantage is that equipment comes in working, with no guessing. For a seller, the pitch is different. Many sellers lack the facilities or the personnel to refurbish and process their machines, and they do not want the consumer headache of selling to individuals. Kaboomracks has facilities, staff and customer support, so rather than leaving a stack of S9s, S17s or S19s in a corner collecting dust, a seller can ship them in, have them repaired and resold, and end up with a check.
Micro Soldering Under the Microscope
The newer service line Snyder wanted to talk about was micro soldering. Most customers know Kaboomracks as a marketplace, and know Robert and Nick as the goofy guys on its videos, but behind the scenes the company had spent the past year building a micro soldering department. Snyder was candid that it had been hard and that the work is difficult to picture until you see it.
imagine trying to take a component the size of the grain of salt and underneath the microscope by hand replace an identical component
Brian Snyder · 3:53
He said he did not know how the technicians manage it, but that the department now had a great team and had started offering repair services to customers who want that kind of board-level work done.
Why Winter Kills More Miners Than Summer
Kaboomracks had also built an engineering team, represented at its booth by Andy, because customers kept arriving with basic electrical and mechanical questions: which transformer to buy, what voltage they need, why a miner is overheating, why they lose so many miners over winter. On that last point Snyder offered the most counterintuitive claim of the talk. Summer is about cooling miners and winter is about keeping them heated, recirculated air matters a great deal in winter, and in his experience cold does more damage than heat.
winter typically kills and destroys more miners that summer does reason why the miner's running at 80 85 degrees it's maybe negative 20 outside
Brian Snyder · 5:03
The mechanism is thermal. A miner running at 80 to 85 degrees shuts down, air at negative 20 degrees moves across the circuit board, and the expansion and contraction of the PCB destroys it. Snyder said that looking at that damage under a microscope in the micro soldering department is what makes doing the engineering the right way so important.
when the miner shuts down native 20 degree air moves across that pcb and the expansion contraction of the pcb causes it to be destroyed
Brian Snyder · 5:15
The Immersion and Electrical Partnership
Snyder said Kaboomracks had partnered with Raptor Power Systems and EDGE Data Solutions, one specializing in immersion and the other in electrical, with Kaboomracks in the middle as the hardware supplier and aftermarket shop. He showed a graph of an S19j Pro running in immersion, which he said can substantially increase hashrate, and described engineering services that begin with 3D modeling, move to design to spec and end with building the facility, with full project management along the way.
The company's staff are also available for loan. Deployments need a lot of people, while long-term maintenance needs a small crew, so rather than staffing up with temps who may not know what they are doing across 10,000 or even 4,000 machines, an operator can bring in Kaboomracks to support the deployment. That includes immersion prep. With EDGE, the company had been working on ways to prepare miners so that they arrive at a facility ready to go straight into the fluid and start mining.
coming up with a bunch of solutions to prep miners so that they can overclock six to eight kilowatts
Brian Snyder · 6:50
One-Stop Shop for Miners
Snyder said he wished he had the video to walk through, and took questions instead. Asked why the company is called Kaboomracks, he said that was a secret and Robert would tell anyone who asked. Asked what ideal customer or product the company was looking for, he answered that the past year had been spent becoming a one-stop solution for Bitcoin miners: procurement, which the company is known for, plus engineering support, mining solutions, aftermarket firmware, provisioning, optimization, tuning and service support. Anything Kaboomracks could not do itself, he said, its partners at EDGE and Raptor could provide the equipment for.
Asked where to find him, Snyder said the booth was over by the coffee. Then, as he had promised a couple of people beforehand, he closed by shouting the company name.