The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, April 8, 2024 landed on eclipse day, as a solar eclipse crossed a large swath of the United States. The host opened with a joke about watching out for bad drivers and strange anomalies, a reminder that the show is for entertainment and education, not financial advice, and a plug for the Mining Disrupt Expo in Miami, June 24 to 26. Then came the numbers: Bitcoin at $69,999, or about 1,430 sats per dollar, with blocks arriving every 9 minutes and 44 seconds. At that pace, he said, it looked really likely the halving would land on April 20.
The first story came from South Korea, where the Democratic party had proposed allowing access to spot Bitcoin ETFs, both domestic and overseas. The host used it to make a point about how slowly adoption by nations and large companies moves. He cited a podcast with James Lavish and Eric Yakes in which both were asked whether Bitcoin is harder to learn for someone from traditional finance or for someone who knows nothing about finance. Both said it is far harder for the traditional finance person. The host said that matched his own experience: he knew nothing about the economy, so he had nothing to unlearn, while talking to others about Bitcoin often feels like running into a brick wall. Every once in a while, though, he said, something clicks, as it did when he showed some older people he knows a chart of one line going up and another going down.
Next came mining news. The host read a report that Bhutan planned to boost its Bitcoin mining capacity by 500% ahead of the halving, ramping up renewable powered operations to 600 megawatts, which he called massive.
He followed it with a report from Carbon Chain finding that Griffin Digital Mining was mining Bitcoin with hydroelectric power and producing zero carbon emissions. The next time someone says miners are boiling the ocean, the host said, you can point to something like this. Better yet, he joked, head down to Miami, talk to actual miners and ask whether they grind up kittens or endangered whales to power their machines. The answer, he said, would be no across the board.
On the institutional side, the host reported that BlackRock had added Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Citigroup as authorized participants for its IBIT Bitcoin ETF. He also read a post from Whale Panda saying the redemption was complete and that what was leaving GBTC now was just normal outflows. The host said there might still be some big outflows at major psychological levels like 100k as people take profit, which he said would make sense. In his view, Bitcoin needed a push into the 80 to 85 range before people would feel it was doing something new.
He then pointed viewers to a clip of ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, who described Bitcoin as a flight to safety and a hedge against devaluation and loss of purchasing power, and said more and more people would wake up to the problem of money printing. The host added his own frustration with government spending, and said he believes the two forces will eventually come to a head. He did not know exactly how it would play out, but he said he thinks Bitcoin plays a role, as people realize nobody can change its 21 million limit and that it can hold the time and energy they put into it.
The host also brought up the earthquake in Taiwan, which he called Thailand on the show and corrected the following week. He said he hoped people there were safe, and that his point was not about the tragedy itself. It was about concentration: if much of your wealth sits in buildings, which can be damaged or hit by new laws, it may be worth diversifying into something where that cannot happen. He was clear he was not telling people not to invest in real estate. His contrast was Bitcoin as digital property that exists in thousands of places at once.
For a bit of mining humor, he shared a post in which someone asked what to do with an empty space, and Pierre Rochard replied that the empty room was a stranded asset waiting to be monetized. The host said he found it rather amusing, and it was a fitting joke for a mining audience used to looking for unused power and space.
He closed by asking viewers to guess where the price would be on April 22, the first episode after the halving. Then he told them it did not matter much. Whether it was 70, 80, 50 or 40 the following week, he said, you have to zoom out. He pointed to an older report, shared by another account, that Fidelity had become one of the biggest Bitcoin bulls with a model suggesting one Bitcoin may be worth 1 billion, and said that if they were right, the short term would not matter much. Prices in the two weeks around the halving, in his view, were noise next to where the network could be years later.
If you are in this for the short term, he said, best of luck; if you are in it for the long term, godspeed. When this episode aired on April 8, 2024, Bitcoin traded at $72,353 by our reference price; on October 12, 2026 it was $84,045. The conversation continues at Mining Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.