The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, August 25, 2025 was a short episode with one argument running through it: the fight between people who run Bitcoin Core and people who run Bitcoin Knots on their nodes. The host opened by promising viewers a reason to come to the second Mining Disrupt Expo, a reason he said sat at the core of the security and sovereignty of Bitcoin itself, and then held it back until the last minute of the show.
The expo was a little under three months away, at the Irving Convention Center in Dallas, Texas, which he described as about a 15-minute drive from the city's big airport. The dates he gave at the close were November 11th through 13th.
A Week That Ended Where It Started
He said he was starting to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. A week earlier he had told viewers Bitcoin was at $117,000. It then spent most of the week in the 112 range before jumping a few thousand dollars in about 20 minutes on the Friday he recorded, which put it back close to where it had been seven days before.
He read the network rather than the chart. A block arrived while he was talking. Blocks were coming in on time. The mempool held more than 100,000 transactions again, which he said was the first time he had seen that in a while. Priority fees were still low, and he noted that some people treat low fees as a bad sign. He said he would come back to that point, and he did.
Kenneth Rogoff's Post, Read Aloud
The first news item was a post by the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff looking back on his old call on Bitcoin. The host read it on air in a voice he admitted might not sound anything like the real Rogoff.
Almost a decade ago, I was the Harvard economist that said Bitcoin was more likely to be worth $100 than 100K.
Kenneth Rogoff (post read on the show) · 1:55
Rogoff's post listed what he had missed. He had been too optimistic about the US adopting what he called sensible cryptocurrency regulation. He had not seen how Bitcoin would compete with fiat currencies as a medium of exchange in a global underground economy he put at $20 trillion, demand he said puts a floor under the price and which he covers in his new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem. And he had not expected regulators, and the regulator-in-chief in particular, to hold large amounts of cryptocurrency, in his view without consequence despite the conflict of interest.
The host was not impressed. He said anyone willing to admit there are possibilities they had not considered can learn something, and that Rogoff did not seem interested in doing that. If an underground economy is what Rogoff thinks holds up the price, the host said, he did not know where to begin. His summary was four words: his loss, our gain.
Two Posts About the Noise
He then turned to the Core and Knots argument through two posts. The first, from an account he read out, said that after looking hard at the debate, the one thing its author could say for certain was this:
The best thing to do here is to continue to stack SATs.
Post read on the show · 4:23
The host added his own line, stay humble, and called the rest noise. The second post was from Joe Burnett, read on the show with his MSBA credential:
When everyone is fighting on this app, it's usually a good time to buy Bitcoin.
Joe Burnett, MSBA (post read on the show) · 4:34
What Low Fees Have to Do With Knots
Back on fees, he said he had raised the subject several times and kept seeing people call low fees a sign that Bitcoin is unhealthy or that nobody wants to use it. He suggested the fees might be a sign of other things, and tied that to the node debate. In his view the Core side is missing something about the people on the Knots side.
From what I can tell, the people on the knots side see Bitcoin as a monetary protocol.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 5:13
He said Knots runners are voting with their wallet, and that some are buying a node for the first time to do it. He did not think the debate was really about blocking spam in practice. Knots supporters would like to do that, he said, but running the software is more a statement of what they care about: they do not want that material on the blockchain and want the rest of the world to see it.
He was careful about the other side. From what he could tell, and he said he was not trying to misrepresent anyone, Core supporters want the network to be a little more open and want the free market to decide. He said he had waded through a lot of posts trying to understand the issue and found a great deal of name-calling and ad hominem attacks that did not help.
The Host's Own Node
Then he gave his own position.
You want full disclosure, I run knots on my [node].
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 6:33
He said he was voting with his wallet and did not want spam on the chain. He anticipated the reply that it would get on there anyway, and said that was not the point: he was showing the network that he wants Bitcoin to be a monetary protocol, and that was all he was trying to do by running Knots.
Ask the Miners
The reason to come to Dallas, he said, was the chance to put the question to miners running huge facilities. What do they care about when it comes to Core and Knots? Do they consider these transactions spam or not? Without mining there is no Bitcoin, he said, so the people at that base layer are the ones whose view matters, and hearing it firsthand was worth the price of a ticket.
When this episode was published, Bitcoin traded at $111,196. On October 26, 2026 it was $79,847.