The first Mining Disrupt News Surge of the year, posted on January 5, 2026, opened by welcoming viewers to 2026 and pointing to one of the biggest events on the horizon: the Mining Disrupt Expo in Miami, Florida, July 21 through 23. The host promised beautiful people, beautiful weather and beautiful business deals, and looked back on Texas and Fort Lauderdale in 2025 as two wonderful events.
As every week, the host reminded viewers that the show is for education and entertainment, not financial advice, and asked them to like and subscribe to stay up to date, as the channel closed in on 4,000 subscribers.
Then the numbers. Bitcoin was bouncing around just over 90,000 dollars, enough to push the sats per dollar ratio down, though still above a thousand. Priority and anytime fees were low, unconfirmed transactions sat around 70,000 and public nodes were just shy of 25,000. When this episode was posted, Bitcoin traded at $93,049; on October 12, 2026 it was $83,419.
Merchant Counts Miss the Point
The main theme picked up a clip from the previous week. In it, a man pointed out that of an estimated 350 million businesses worldwide, around 18,000 accept Bitcoin, which he called basically zero.
The host had argued then that merchant acceptance is not the metric for measuring success, and this week brought two examples to back that up: one most viewers probably have not heard of, and one they almost certainly have.
The Commander Lesson
The first comes from Magic: The Gathering. As of 2026, the most popular way to play the game is a format called Commander, also known as EDH. The format was not invented by Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes the game. According to the host, it was thought up by players in Alaska who had trouble getting cards and built a way to play with what they had. Today it is, by far, the most popular way the game is played, and nobody at the top planned it that way.
It took about 15 years before the company caught up. In 2011, Wizards of the Coast released its first preconstructed deck designed for Commander, even though people had been playing the format since around the mid '90s and were already moving card prices. The same, the host said, is true of Bitcoin, and 2024, when the ETFs launched, was its official moment.
Ducks on Jeeps
The second example is the ducks people leave on Jeeps. The host said it started in 2020, when a woman had a bad experience at a gas station and wanted to turn it into something fun. She put rubber ducks on a fellow Jeep owner's car, they loved it, and it went viral.
Now ducks show up in Jeep commercials, and Jeep even brought a rubber duck about 60 feet tall to the Detroit Auto Show. The point, the host said, is that it was not imposed from the top down. It grew from the bottom up, and that is how money works too. So when someone notes how few merchants accept Bitcoin, it does not really matter.
A One Way Door
The host tied this to a post from an account called Ron Swanson, which said that every second of every day Bitcoin clicks for someone new, and that person never sees money the same way again. Virtually none of those people, the post said, will ever go back to fiat shackles. Bitcoin, in its framing, is a one way door.
That, the host said, is why merchants are not the driver. People are. Someone sees on Cash App that they can pay with Bitcoin at different places, asks the coffee shop owner why the terminal does not take it, and the owner starts looking into it. Conversations like that are happening in this country and around the world, from the ground up. It is truly a grassroots thing.
Nobody Knows Anything
Next was a post from Bitquant, which the host recommended as a great follow, arguing that simply avoiding leveraged trading puts you most of the way toward being a top performer. The host noted that the large majority of people who trade lose money, possibly close to 99%.
To show that even professionals miss, the host shared a chart posted by Nate Geraci of Wall Street strategists' year end targets for the S&P 500 in 2025, which swung back and forth all year. Nobody has a clue, the host said, which is why it is absurd when people insist gold or stocks are not supposed to move the way they are. The host's own approach is to save in Bitcoin and sleep like a baby each night.
FUD Has One Purpose
The episode closed with a post from NVK, the person behind the Coldcard, which the host still thinks is fabulous. Bitcoiners will not agree on everything, the host said, and that is fine, as long as the shared goal is for Bitcoin to win. This particular point, though, was one to remember every time the FUD rolls in: FUD exists to get your Bitcoin cheap.
Do not let the FUDsters have it for cheap, the host said. Make them pay the price you deserve, whether that is 10 million or something else, and wait until it gets there. The host signed off looking ahead to Miami later in the year.