Greg Rogowski has been the CEO of Mining City since it launched in 2018. His career started in Marketing after he graduated from Warsaw University with a degree in Marketing & Neophilology.

Twelve years of media industry marketing and management throughout Europe and South America led Greg to combine his professional expertise with his personal fascination with blockchain technology. He began mining Bitcoin personally in 2016 and became the VP of Marketing at Mine Best LLC.

While the majority of his professional life has been connected with advertising, media and marketing, Greg’s experience is not just in the creative segment of brand management, but also firmly rooted in statistical and research-driven strategy and planning.

Greg has used his interest in art and sciences when working on the creative aspects of strategies, and when some abstract and lateral thinking is required. His genuine enthusiasm for classical music and cars is matched only by his passion for blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

This interest led Greg to quit his position and partner with MineBest and to strategically develop one of the world’s largest initiatives bringing together people who want to unite their strength and increase their chance to mine Bitcoin – Mining City. Since the project launched, he has traveled the world helping to spread the word about the merits of cryptocurrencies. He is also in charge of most of the events organized by Mining City.

Greg Rogowski recently agreed to share some background of events in China that led to losses for Mining City and raised questions by the Mining City community.  We appreciate Greg’s openness and honesty in addressing these issues and sharing the background with our readers.

Can you tell us a little about Mining City?

Mining City is a platform that provides mining plans, giving users access to hash power and mining rewards. Hashpower is the computing power needed to generate cryptocurrencies.

Mining City users can buy crypto mining plans that give them access to hash power and mining rewards.  Hashpower provided by Mining City is used to mine Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies. 

To learn more about Mining City, its products and services visit Mining City’s official social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube and Twitter.

Can you explain what happened to Mining City in China?

The incident in China led to the tremendous loss. For a while, we thought it was something we would never recover from. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, and the incident isn’t over yet, but we have a brighter hope for the future that we hope to share with our loyal and understanding community.

The mining incident in China was due to a variety of problems, and untrustworthy partners. I plan to explain the situation fully to you, to make up for our lack of full transparency up until now. I hope you come to understand it was not by our own choice that our community was left in the dark but it was for the sake of the criminal investigation conducted in China due to this incident.

Leading Up To The China Incident

The incident in China was created due to a few situations that I must explain to you before I can explain what went wrong. This is so you can understand how our strategic partner MineBest operated in China and how their mining practices worked there.

China was a pretty convenient place to mine, but there were many problems with it. The main one was that there are wet and dry seasons in China that are pretty extreme. It was common practice to move miners from one area to another with the changing seasons. This keeps the machines safe and lowered the costs.

MineBest knew this and was coordinating with their partners in China to handle the logistics. MineBest thought they could trust their partners there to help them make this move, and trusted a lot of the details to them.

Although MineBest CEO Eyal Avramovich had a lot of experience in problem-solving and had handled many issues in the past, there were many risks involved. Not only to increase our profit, but to keep Mining City up-to-date, secure, and profitable for all of our users and the company itself. We accept those risks, and while we have experienced some setbacks, have done well in general.  

The Pandemic also created addition problems since it became next to impossible to travel to China as much as we wanted, to keep a close eye on operations. We trusted the external partners. And this trust is what let us down.

Part 1: Stolen Miners

MineBest had several partners in China. They had a plan for coordinating the rapidly growing business activities which they did not end up following. Instead, the local partners took a huge personal risk, stole the mining machines and stopped communicating with MineBest.

MineBest reported the theft to local authorities in China, hired lawyers and partners, and had a whole team dedicated solely to finding out what exactly had happened.

This was a hard time for MineBest and all of us. We all always try to be transparent with our users, and many were wondering what had happened with mining activities. However, for the sake of the investigation, local authorities and our lawyers ordered us not to mention anything more about the incident until it was resolved.

This caused a huge loss for MineBest and us, as I am sure you can imagine. They had lost a large number of miners, and violated one of our ideologies, through no fault of our own. Our users were unhappy with us, but there wasn’t much we could do.

The miners alone had a massive financial loss. The loss was really unimaginable.

Part 2: Lost and Found

The situation lasted over a year. MineBest and Mining City lost an enormous amount in assets and potential Bitcoin. It was enough that we thought we would never be able to recover, even with our genius problem-solvers on the case.

At the end of it all, the police in China managed to find the majority of the stolen machines and arrested several people who were involved in this crime. These individuals are still behind bars at the time of writing and are expected to face criminal prosecution in China

However, many of the machines which were found, were broken or damaged. It isn’t over for us, either. There are still many mysteries that we will have to solve. Not to mention, during that time, the cryptocurrency mining has become illegal in China. That means that the machines we managed to find can’t even be connected in the country. They would have to be exported or liquidated.

Thanks to Eyal’s efforts, there is a chance that most of the miners will be returned to MineBest within several months. Once they are returned, we believe MineBest will be able to start compensating Mining City for the damage it caused to us and our users and develop better, more secure systems somewhere else.

The goal of MineBest and Mining City is to compensate Mining City customers as much as we can. We want our users to feel we take care of their interests as much as of our own, or even more so.

The Future

We are waiting for MineBest to recover miners from China, but are also coming up with solutions for our users. At this time, we have two major solutions we are considering:

1. Significantly extending the mining period for those that purchase mining plans, and therefore granting additional mining rewards and
2. Opening the BTC mining allocation functionality as much as possible in condition to the amount of recovered and operational mining machines

These are still a relatively long way out, as they won’t likely be available until hash power is received from the machines in China.

We also hope our users come to understand why we couldn’t be as transparent as we wanted. If it wasn’t for both the law and lawyers strictly forbidding us from revealing more details of the situation, we would have kept our users informed.

We hope a situation like this never happens again, and we can continue to be transparent without any issues. We are constantly learning about the cryptocurrency world and handling new dynamics as it grows and changes.

Things will go wrong, and problems will arise. However, we believe that with new security measures in place, and the support of our community, we can grow and learn from these issues to do better in the future.