Weeks after the first U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs began trading in January, the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, February 19, 2024 asked whether the old price models were still worth anything. The host's answer came mostly from other people: one video clip and four posts he read on air, each arguing that the new ETF buyers had changed the market faster than the models could follow.
He recorded the episode on Sunday, February 18, for release the next day, and opened with his standard reminder that the show is for entertainment and education only. Viewers, he said, should do their own research, and what they do with their money is no business of his.
The numbers first
As usual, he started on timechaincalendar.com. Bitcoin was hovering around $52,000, which meant that for the first time in a while a dollar bought less than 2,000 sats. Blocks had run close to 9 minutes apart the week before; they had evened out and were back over 10 minutes. High-priority fees were 25 sats per vbyte, low-priority fees about 10, and he said he had seen them as low as two the day before.
He then plugged the Mining Disrupt conference in Miami, June 24 to 26, 2024, as the place to learn about mining and energy, with a line he returns to often:
if you don't have miners you don't have Bitcoin
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 1:20
The $150 billion arithmetic
The first segment was a clip of a commentator, not named in the episode, forecasting that U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs would take in more than $150 billion by the end of 2025, against a few billion so far. He called it a big claim and then argued it was not that big once you do the arithmetic.
Independent investment advisers, the ones running their own firms, manage around $8 trillion. Industry surveys by [DACFP] and Bitwise, he said, show that about three quarters of advisers plan to allocate to the ETFs, at an average of about 2.5% of assets. Eight trillion dollars times 77% times 2.5% comes to roughly $150 billion. That counts only independent advisers; it leaves out the wirehouses, the regional broker-dealers and institutions. Once word spreads that Bitcoin is a train worth being on, he said, more people will try to pile on.
The forecast belongs to the speaker in the clip. The host played it as the setup for the rest of the show, not as his own number.
Models built on old data
Next came a long post from Stack Hodler, which gave the episode its title. Its opening claim was that viewers were not bullish enough, because every existing Bitcoin model was built on data that was now obsolete. The post repeated a rumor that over-the-counter desks had set up makeshift boiler rooms to phone whales and beg them for coins below $100,000.
Its explanation for why demand had not yet shown up in full was a waiting period. Registered investment advisers, the post said, face a 90-plus-day wait before they can allocate to a new investment product, so trillions in capital would sit frozen on the sidelines for the next 60 days, with advisers watching Bitcoin run like greyhounds in the starting traps. The episode gave no source for the waiting period; it was the poster's claim.
MicroStrategy and the S&P 500
The same post turned to MicroStrategy. The stock, it said, was up 63% over the past 3 months against 46% for Bitcoin, and an MSTR pump was simply a delayed Bitcoin pump: Michael Saylor would sell more shares and buy Bitcoin with the proceeds. With that performance, the post argued, MicroStrategy had a chance of entering the S&P 500, which would bring tens of billions in passive flows from index investors, much of it ending up in spot Bitcoin. Its line on that point was that even hardcore Vanguard Bogleheads would end up stacking Bitcoin by way of MicroStrategy.
From there the post moved from flows to belief. Bitcoin's price, it said, is not tied to earnings or product launches; it is limited only by what buyers and sellers understand. Some holders already priced it at $1 million or more a coin, and if the wider market came round to that view, nothing would stop a far higher price virtually overnight. Most people, it said, still treated Bitcoin as a trade.
As a thought experiment, the post imagined a nation such as Saudi Arabia announcing that it was stacking Bitcoin with its oil profits as a multi-generational endowment. Who, it asked, would sell for a mere $100,000 then? It made the same point about corporations and billionaires, noting that Jeff Bezos had sold $4 billion of Amazon stock a few months after being seen with Saylor in Saint-Tropez, and asking whether Saylor had won over another whale. The post itself answered: who knows.
Do nothing
A shorter post from Bit Paine followed. Anyone who had accumulated Bitcoin in a meaningful way between 2020 and 2024, it said, had already done the hard part. The rest of the job, it said, was to do nothing at all: keep custody of your own coins, not sell to Wall Street or swap into other tokens, and stop trying to time the market. It ended with a warning that some people would still manage to get even that wrong.
A channel, and a flip of gold
A post from an account called Rip Van Winkle took on the common forecasts. Most people, it said, were projecting a price in the low hundreds of thousands within the long-term trend, which assumed that despite historic buying of $500 million a day in net ETF inflows, Bitcoin would keep crawling up the lower line of its channel. The poster thought supply was being absorbed faster than that. Even the channel's midpoint put the price in the $700,000 range, and the poster called a push deep into the channel probable given wars and further money printing. At the midpoint, the post noted, Bitcoin would flip gold.
The last item was the shortest: Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas reporting that BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF had taken in $5.2 billion so far that year, 50% of the net flows across all 417 of BlackRock's ETFs.
China, Ethiopia and BRICS
The host closed the loop on the previous week's story about mining in Ethiopia. Chinese miners were heading there for cheap energy and a good climate, and headlines framed it as BRICS entering Bitcoin mining, with Ethiopia, a new BRICS member, signing mining deals with its partner China. His summary was short:
the long and short of this one is that China is getting into Bitcoin
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 8:33
Perception and reality
He ended where the posts had pointed: perception shapes reality. The reality on that Sunday, he said, was that a whole Bitcoin could be sold for about $52,000. Whatever the forecasts said, that was the price.
if you want to participate in that reality and you see where things are going then you might want to get some Bitcoin
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:05
He added that this was not financial advice, and certainly not health advice: if you are out in the rain you might want an umbrella, or you might just look up and open your mouth. He did not know what viewers were into. He signed off with another reminder about the Miami conference.
When this episode was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $52,346. On October 26, 2026 it was $79,831. The targets read on air ran from $100,000 to $1 million and beyond; none came with a date.