The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, February 3, 2025 opened with a warning before any of the week's news. The host said Bitcoin faced at least two potentially catastrophic issues, that he did not mean to raise alarm bells for nothing, and that listeners could do something about two of the three things he would cover that same day.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently facing at least two potentially catastrophic issues for Bitcoin.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 0:00
He held the argument for the opinion section at the end, and went through the week first.
The numbers that week
He told viewers the Mining Disrupt Expo was about six weeks away, that his flight and hotel were booked, and that they could meet Simply Bitcoin's Nico, Ben of BTC Sessions and Dennis Porter there.
On the network, he said the price was still hovering just above $100,000, that blocks were arriving about half a minute faster than the 10-minute target, and that nodes stood at over 21,000. He also pointed out that the mempool had been empty for a while, and said that would come back in the opinion section.
Lummis, Trump Media and the reserve question
He found nothing on Monday worth reading out. On Tuesday, Senator Cynthia Lummis thanked Dennis Porter for his kind words and replied that many legislators and their staffs still had a lot to learn about Bitcoin, and borrowed a line from Parker Lewis: the suddenly moment was just around the corner. The host also showed a second Lummis post that day, "big things afoot", with a list of committee topics that he read as including nuclear energy. He noted it had drawn very little attention.
Wednesday's item, he said, had slipped under the radar too. Trump Media and Technology Group, with cash and equivalents of more than $700 million as of December 31, 2024, said its board had approved investing up to $250 million, to be custodied by Charles Schwab. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies or crypto-related securities were on the list of places the money could go.
He then played an interview clip in which the guest, addressed only as David, was asked when the administration would announce a Bitcoin reserve. The guest noted the Lummis bill for a national reserve and said the president had asked his working group to study it.
President Trump has asked us to study that issue.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 3:29
The host's response was a question of his own: were they really looking at it, and how long would that take? He said it was unknown.
Tether on Lightning and the states
On Thursday, Lightning Labs announced that Tether was coming to Bitcoin and Lightning, and said USDT would bring hundreds of millions of users and trillions in volume. The host's view was that it all comes back to Bitcoin. He also read a post from Andrew of AP_Abacus citing two sources who said there would be no XRP in any version of a reserve and that discussions had moved to Bitcoin only.
Friday's item was a map of US states with Bitcoin bills, which he compared to a weather map of a storm front. He listed Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming, and pointed to a state tracker shared by Marty Party that showed 18 states with something under way. He predicted that number would pass 25 before the end of 2025.
The week closed with another AP_Abacus post on the banks underwriting MicroStrategy's STRK preferred stock, which sources described as "as oversubscribed as anything we've done in the last two years".
The wallet and the empty mempool
Then he came back to the warning, and put three items on screen: your wallet, your hash power and your node. The wallet came first. On the Timechain Calendar, unconfirmed transactions stood at 7,440. A month or a few months earlier, he said, the mempool had held hundreds of thousands of transactions.
His reading, which he said others on Twitter shared, was that fewer people were buying Bitcoin on an exchange and moving it into their own custody.
Because if you don't have self custody of your Bitcoin, then you don't really truly have any Bitcoin.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:09
Hash power and Foundry's seven blocks
The second item was hash power. If you are not mining at all, he said, you are not helping the decentralization of the network. His example was Foundry finding seven blocks in a row a little while earlier. He granted that the odds of that are very low and that it was an anomaly, but said that if more and more hash power points to Foundry, it will happen more often.
This is why the decentralization of mining is so paramount now more than ever.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:54
The node and the 21 million cap
The third item, he said, was less of a catastrophic issue, because once you have it handled it stops mattering: your own node. His case was a hypothetical. If BlackRock or anyone else announced a hard fork of Bitcoin with no 21 million cap, and as many coins as they wanted, that would put Bitcoin back where fiat is.
Well, then we're back to the same old problem that we have with fiat.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 8:34
What he said to do
Two of the three, he said, can be fixed right away. A hardware wallet can be bought online and shipped in days, overnight if you want, and you can take your coins into self custody immediately. A node can be installed on an old computer, wiped for the purpose, in an afternoon.
Hash power was harder to solve alone. Solo Satoshi, he said, is commonly sold out. Even so, he called all three of paramount importance, and said a Bitcoiner who does none of them is not really a Bitcoiner.
His closing line was about who Bitcoin depends on. It does not need the big players, he said: not BlackRock, not Fidelity, not even MicroStrategy. Those are icing on the cake. The cake itself is the everyday user.
It needs the plebs.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:27
Bitcoin traded at $95,214 on February 3, 2025, the date of the episode. On October 26, 2026 it was $79,651.