HomeBlockchainInterviewCardano SPO Column: Bio Pool

Cardano SPO Column: Bio Pool [BIO]

This week’s guest on the Cardano SPO Column is a stake pool that would like to offer a platform that supports the decentralized vision of blockchain technology as well as offering all delegators a way in which they can support environmental projects: Bio Pool [BIO].

Last week’s guest was a stake pool from Australia. One of the operators is also the host of the YouTube channel and Podcast called Learn Cardano.

This initiative is a point of reference for everything Cardano and every week or two we will invite a Stake Pool Operator (SPO) to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Hello, glad to have you here. Tell us something about yourselves, where are you based and what are your backgrounds?

Hello, thank you very much for this invitation. We are Beatrix and Christian from Germany. We are wife and husband and we both share the same love for nature. Over the last 10 years, we have been fighting for it by supporting various global organizations.

We also spend our holidays doing beach/coastal cleanups or help our wildlife by supporting sanctuaries. We both have normal jobs: my wife is a teacher in a kindergarten and I am working in IT for a german Hotel group.

When did you discover Cardano and how are you finding the process of operating a stake pool? What is the hardest part?

We got in late, by the end of 2020. We both were not familiar with cryptocurrency before, and I stumbled over a video from Charles Hoskinson about Cardano and decentralization. He caught my attention within the first minutes and a couple of hours later I got infected. Charles for me is one of the smartest individuals I have ever seen in my whole life. The way he speaks about the Cardano blockchain and its possibilities is just brilliant. He is a superhero in my eyes, and I am glad to be a part of this all.

In the beginning, the hardest part for us was getting into social media and making our stake pool public. We have never used social networks prior to starting our pool because our lives were pretty much offline with friends and family. My wife did some Instagram because of the charities we follow but that was it. We are just normal people with a passion for environmental protection. The first months were tough because we did not know how Twitter worked and that we needed to first gain followers to attract people. Getting attention is not easy there, especially for us who aren’t native English speakers.

Can you tell us more about your efforts towards the protection of the environment and the well-being of animals? Why is it important to you?

We created this pool because we were not able to find a place to stake our ADA. Pools either lack transparency or just don’t support the right organizations we are interested in. Mission driven is a very delicate topic. Sure, you can just donate money anywhere and call it mission driven but for us charity means a lot more.

My wife and I are very empathic and if we see that other people, animals or even the environment suffer, we suffer at the thought of it as well. It bothers us and we can´t ignore it, whether we see the horrible pictures/news from the organizations, through self-research or in real life. It is especially the animals that are affected by cruel actions. They are kept in captivity, are losing their habitats due to forest fires or deforestation and are hunted for profit/businesses. All of this is caused by humans and we can’t understand why people do these kinds of atrocities.

Everybody and everything, even nature, should be treated equally and with respect! My wife and I do not want to tolerate this anymore, we want to take responsibility and stop this crime. We want to help those who can´t help themselves. This is our business! And of course, we are really really thankful that diverse environmental organizations take action and help locally. We have to support them for their brilliant job. In the last couple of years, we spent our holidays where support was needed the most. We have helped on so-called beach cleanups, gathering plastic from beaches and oceans while also helping coastal animals to survive. Plastic and climate change are our greatest enemies because they destroy our planet even faster. The first time we saw beaches flooded with plastic bottles and bags and dead birds in between, we cried.

Because of that, we started our pool and implemented a voting system within our website. It is basic stuff, but it does an excellent job. Every delegator can register to our website and either propose projects or vote on existing ones to save our planet. We distribute the pool’s revenue between all of the organizations who got votes while our delegators receive 5-6% like any other pool, but with us they can do some good on top of it.

Cardano is often described as being an environmentally friendly blockchain as opposed to Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have been criticized a lot due to their power consumption. Why is that?

For us Cardano would not have been an option with the same energy consumption as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Bitcoin is a Proof of Work protocol which has the same energy consumption as Norway with nearly 135 TW per year. But it’s also a problem of electronic waste. Proof of Work needs up to date hardware to provide competitive hash rates and this hardware has a very short lifespan because of this extensive use. To give a perspective: if Bitcoin were run on solar power only, it would need around 170.000.000 solar panels.

Cardano instead verifies transactions in a different way. The intensive hashing is not required! Proof of Stake uses a lot less energy and still outperforms all other top 10 cryptocurrencies. With around 2700 stake pools it uses only 0,0035 TW per year. This is environmentally friendly and a huge difference from Bitcoin mining. In our opinion, Cardano will succeed in the future.

Thank you kindly for your time. Closing remarks? Where can people follow you?

The most amazing part of getting into Cardano and Twitter is that we are able to meet so many awesome people from all over the world. Tell us your story or your mission. We’d love to get in touch with you. So if you have some questions or just want to start a nice chat with us, feel free to contact us anytime via Twitter (Christian, Beatrix), our Website and YouTube.

 

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the SPOs are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOHK.

 

Patryk Karter
Patryk Karter
Passionate about new technologies, nutrition, and philosophy, Patryk spends his days exploring the infinite universe of the web. He moved to London after living most of his life in Rome. He starts studying Computer Science at King's College of London but soon understands that it is not his path, instead he decides to invest his time and money in blockchain technology and in the meantime takes university courses available on the web. Now he is a trader and works as a freelancer.
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