The Mining Disrupt news update released on August 1, 2023 covered one story and one story alone: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking to Dennis Porter in a roughly half hour interview at Mining Disrupt 2023 in Miami. As the show put it, it was the first time RFK had given an interview answering questions on the topic of Bitcoin. On August 1, 2023, Bitcoin traded at $29,704. On October 11, 2026 it was $83,079.
this was the first time that RFK has given an interview answering questions on the topic of Bitcoin
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The host laid out two ground rules before playing any of it. The clips would run a little faster than normal, at 1.15 speed, and he would trim sections of what Kennedy said to get to his points sooner, without changing his narrative. He encouraged viewers to watch the full interview.
First, the numbers from timechaincalendar.com: an exchange rate of $29,433 for one Bitcoin, or 3,397 sats per dollar. Blocks were averaging 10 minutes and 21 seconds, just over the 10 minute target, which pointed to a downward difficulty adjustment of 3.27 percent. The 14 day average hashrate was 372.4 exahash per second.
On the Campaign Trail
The interview opened with Porter asking Kennedy how the campaign trail had been treating him. Kennedy said it had been going shockingly well despite attacks, pointing to favorability numbers from a Harvard Harris poll released two days earlier. He said he was 21 points ahead of any other candidate in favorability and had the lowest unfavorability rating.
The host used that answer to set the theme of the episode. No matter what the accepted narrative is, he said, there is sometimes a true story underneath it. In Bitcoin's case, he said, it can be that mining is actually good for the environment. Sometimes it is that a candidate the legacy media dismisses might know what he is talking about. In both cases, he argued, the way to find out is to verify rather than trust.
The Trucker Protests and Frozen Accounts
Porter then asked Kennedy what had been the catalyst for his interest in Bitcoin. Kennedy pointed to the Canadian trucker protests. If you watch the many videos of that protest, he said, it looked almost like Woodstock, a joyful gathering where people were kind to each other, picked up garbage and danced in the street.
The host added his own account, which he was careful to label as pure anecdote. People he knows in Canada had sent him pictures of the protest showing people hanging out, cooking burgers and doing nothing violent at all. The segment went on to describe how the Canadian government used facial recognition, GPS and the license plates of the trucks to identify the owners and then shut down their bank accounts, leaving them unable to buy food or pay their bills.
money is the invention the discovery if you will of our ability human the human species ability to transact our time and energy
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The show's point was that when a central government decides how, or whether, people may use their own time and energy, something essential has been taken from them. A national central bank digital currency, the show argued, would put a single centralized entity in control of every monetary action a person wants to take.
Programmable Money in China
Kennedy described what he had seen in China, where digital currencies were not only digitized but programmable. If people did not reach certain credit scores, he said, or were caught by facial recognition without a mask, or sent communications the government did not like, their money could be switched off, or limited to grocery stores within a certain radius of their home.
The host asked viewers to imagine living with that. If your money only worked in certain places, and stopped working the moment you walked past a line on a map, you would be a prisoner in your own home. That, he said, is directly connected to energy, which is where the interview went next.
Smoke Screens and Surplus Power
Asked about the energy implications of Bitcoin and any concerns he had, Kennedy gave the line that named the episode.
a lot of the concerns about energy use are smoke screens
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He added that there are real problems and that Bitcoin mining is a high energy user. But he said miners have a strong incentive to seek out cheap and surplus energy. Many coal and other carbon fueled power plants cannot turn off at night and keep producing power even when there is no market for it, and he said Bitcoiners chase those kinds of markets. They also chase green energy where there are big surpluses and variable power. Kennedy said he would do everything he could to encourage Bitcoiners to have good energy policies.
bitcoiners Chase those kind of markets
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The host pushed back on that last part. He did not think miners needed encouragement. Miners do not want to spend more on energy than they have to, he said. They are modern day alchemists, transmuting energy into Bitcoin and selling it for a profit, and the free market already pushes them toward the cheapest and best power.
Verify, Don't Trust
For the host, the biggest takeaway was the word smoke screens. Much of the talk about Bitcoin mining's energy use, he argued, is noise, and Kennedy was going through the same thing personally. If you spend the time to verify and not trust, he said, you find that what Kennedy says is pretty sane. He asks why a big corporation is allowed to do what a small business cannot, and why a company can poison a river and put fishermen out of work. Those are good questions, the host said, and he thought much of the American public respected that curiosity.
He closed by encouraging viewers to watch the full interview and pointed to the next Mining Disrupt in Miami. The conversation continues at Mining Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.