The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, December 15, 2025 set out to argue that Bitcoin is not what most people think it is. It ended somewhere few Bitcoin shows go: with the host holding up a Lego wagon from an old castle set and telling viewers that some things are worth more than their Bitcoin. In between he read the network numbers, ran a long-range price projection he admitted he could hardly believe, and closed with his gut call for 2026.
The episode opened, as the show always does, with the reminder that it is entertainment and education, not financial advice, and a ticket plug for the next Mining Disrupt Expo in Miami, Florida, which he called the only mining-centric expo in town. Texas, he said, had been a little quieter and more intimate; Miami would be a big one.
And Bitcoin is the best money that humanity has ever seen.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 0:19
The numbers on the screen
The host read the price on his screen as $90,336. Fees were close to nothing: 3.9 sats to get a transaction into the next blocks quickly, and 0.2 sats for a patient one, the kind of move a holder makes when shifting coins into cold storage. "It's basically free at this point," he said, and asked whether anything else lets people move that much value for so little. Hashrate was still in the zettahash range, blocks were arriving a little faster than the ten-minute target, and the public node count sat in the 25,000 range after a small dip. Bitcoin closed that day at $89,652.
Not a stock: a network of individuals
His theme for the week was what Bitcoin is. Speaking for himself, he said that when he first heard of it, about 10 years ago, he took it for a joke, and then for something like another stock: a thing a company had come up with, which a person buys with money earned at a day job. Those similarities are real, he said, but they miss the point. The most important thing to understand, setting mining aside, is the network.
To make the case he read a post that said people may not care about debasement, but the government cares about extracting value from them. He tweaked it. In his view the government is interested in extracting value, but it does not see anyone as a person at all; it sees a mass of people. Bitcoin, he argued, is the opposite.
government, but you are not just a number to Bitcoin.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 4:28
He tied that to two causes Bitcoiners had organized around. Individuals, he said, helped get Ross free, a reference to the campaign for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and he had signed that petition himself. A second petition was circulating for the developers of Samourai Wallet, who, as he put it, just wrote code that let people do what they wanted with their own money and were being prosecuted for it. He said people should be free to do pretty much whatever they want as long as it does not directly harm someone else, and that letting people move their money freely harms no one he can see.
Anyone who takes part, he said, whether by holding, running a node or mining, is helping the network and is a voice that matters in it.
Saylor's 30% and the $240 million coin
If participants help the network, he asked, what do they get back? He turned to Michael Saylor, who had said he expects Bitcoin to rise about 30% a year for the next 20 years. The host said he is not a math guy and could not believe the numbers when he checked them, so he ran them out to 30 years instead. At 30% a year, he said, the price in 2055 comes to roughly $240 million a coin, a figure he called insane and said would mean a great deal of wealth flowing in from real estate, gold and elsewhere, along with a lot of money printing.
Then he offered a more conservative case: half of the lower amount, which he put at $4 million a coin. That also sounded insane to him, he said, though over 30 years perhaps less so.
Paychecks, temptation and a Rubbermaid bin
He read a line from Jimmy Song: "The temptation to spend grows with price. So, I'm grateful when that temptation is mitigated for a bit." Then he got personal. When a paycheck comes in, he and his wife sit down, look at the bills and decide how much they can move into Bitcoin that week, sometimes a dollar, sometimes more if the month allows it. And, he said, you cannot play with your bitcoins, despite what Trump says. Even if you could, he was not sure what you would do with them.
That set up the part of the show he clearly wanted to get to. For a few years he had been keeping his and his brother's childhood Legos in a Rubbermaid bin. Recently, for no reason he could name, he took them out and built an old castle Wolfpack Renegade set from its instructions. He showed the wagon on camera, lifted its lid to reveal a chest inside and joked that the riders were on a smuggling run, perhaps moving their bitcoins around.
Well, I have been the caretaker of my and my brother's childhood Legos for I don't know, a few years now, and they've just been sitting in a Rubbermaid bin.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:49
He admitted to being a 40-year-old man who has, on occasion, ridden that horse around his house. He called the collection of plastic bricks a strange portal into his childhood, like reaching back and shaking hands with a younger version of himself. Over the past couple of weeks, he said, he had spent a little money on new sets and built them with his wife. He does not have the hours he had as a child, but the sets had brought back a flood of good memories.
A balance to be had
The point, he said, was not that anyone should sell Bitcoin. He repeated that Bitcoin is the best money he has seen and, as far as he can tell, the best thing to invest in, and that in his personal opinion, and not as financial advice, it is one of the best ways to build generational wealth. But money is not the same thing as memories.
invest in, you cannot build memories in the same way that you can with a physical thing that you can hold.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:30
He was not telling viewers to take up Legos, he said. It might be woodworking, plumbing or dance. Whatever the hobby, the experiences and the time spent with other people are worth a great deal.
Arguably, it's worth a whole lot more than your Bitcoin.
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:58
"All I'm saying is there's a balance to be had," he said.
Twenty One goes live, and a call for 2026
To round out the week's news, he noted that Twenty One had gone live under the XXI ticker, reading a post from Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino: "So it begins." He linked it to Jack Mallers, Strike and Tether, which he had talked about a week earlier, and said he had seen the writing on the wall without any inside news.
With this administration in place and Jerome Powell on his way out as Fed chair, he said, his gut told him that 2026 would be wonky. He declined to give a price target. There would be dips, he said, but he expected Bitcoin to be noticeably higher on December 15, 2026 than it was that day, and not by a token amount. He signed off with a reminder that he would see viewers in Miami in July.
When this episode was recorded, Bitcoin closed at $89,652. On October 26, 2026 it was $80,299, with the date of his call still ahead.