The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, May 12, 2025 opened on a round number. Bitcoin was back over $100,000, which the host put at a market cap of about $2 trillion. He set that against gold, which he guessed at about $23 trillion, and said Bitcoin still had a little more than a 10x to go before it passed the metal.
It was a studio show, not a conference session. The host gave the usual note that the show is for entertainment and education and is not financial advice, and pointed viewers to tickets for the next Mining Disrupt Expo, which was moving from Florida to Texas, in the Irving area near Dallas Fort Worth Airport. He said he had been through Texas but never to it, and called the state the home of Bitcoin mining. Sponsorships were 20% off until June 5.
He set out the plan for the episode up front: a game of chicken between generations, the case for having a price, a detour into what he called woo-woo territory, and a way for miners to get what he called basically free money, with a major caveat.
The burn wallet question
The first item was a post from an account the host credited with calling the $84,000 close almost to the dollar not long before. The post took aim at the line that the first rule of Bitcoin is never to sell. If holders really believe that, it asked, why not send their coins to a burn wallet, so nobody can come after them with an $8 wrench? The host noted that the joke usually involves a $5 wrench, and said the higher figure must account for inflation.
He expected the replies. Some holders would say they plan to borrow against their coins, or use them in other ways, so they cannot burn them. Others would admit that never selling does not really mean never. That, for him, was the point.
my message is have a price in mind, have an idea of what it is you're looking to do
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 3:25
His reasoning was practical. If the price ran to $200,000, $500,000 or a million dollars over a few months or a few years, a holder could be looking at a 10x or a 15x in net worth. He asked what kind of life a holder wants. Without an answer worked out in advance, he said, that holder would face some really difficult questions about what to do.
Holders against boomers
This was the game of chicken he had promised at the top of the show, and he framed it as a question of who blinks first. On one side are holders with time. On the other are boomers who own the things younger people want: homes, cars and businesses.
There are boomers that, let's be honest, don't have time on their side
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 4:01
Someone in their 30s or 40s who follows the Bitcoin ethos and looks after their health, he argued, has a good chance of outliving someone in their 70s or 80s. The older group will want to use the years they have to go on vacations and visit family, and that takes money. Holding, in his telling, is the younger side's advantage. He finished the point with his own view that Bitcoin is fast becoming the best money anybody has ever known.
New Hampshire and PorcFest
Before the last two items he marked a piece of news: New Hampshire had passed a strategic Bitcoin reserve and made it law, the first state to enact a Bitcoin bill into law.
The bill was HB 302, signed by Governor Kelly Ayotte on May 6, 2025, the week before the episode. According to Bitcoin Magazine, it lets the state treasurer invest up to 5% of certain public funds in precious metals and digital assets with a market capitalization above $500 billion, a bar only bitcoin met.
The host's angle was history. He described PorcFest, named for the porcupine, an event in New Hampshire that he was not sure still runs. Its aim was to draw people from other states to move there and change things through grassroots organizing and voting. People at PorcFest were paying in bitcoin from the very early days, he said, so it fit that the Live Free or Die state was the first to sign such a bill.
A landfill for a miner
The free money came with its caveat: it is for miners. A miner who can find a dump and talk to the people running it, he said, may have found a good match. He read a post from Daniel Batten, who wrote that he was in talks with the owner of one landfill and with others. Batten wrote that the site's emissions were on par with those of Estonia, Cyprus or Nepal, that its energy was stranded, and that the owners knew Bitcoin mining offers a unique solution.
The host did not go into how such a project works, and the post did not name the landfill. Batten ended it with: watch this space.
How early it is
The closing item was the woo-woo part. The host compared Bitcoin's stage to the early internet, when people argued about the handshake sound a modem made, whether it could be changed, whether it mattered, and whether it could be duck sounds.
He read a post from Tyler Campbell, who wrote that it is insane that developers working on a $2 trillion protocol hold in-person debates while the broader tech industry is nowhere to be found. Campbell named people from FAANG companies, Microsoft and Stripe, and contributors to open-source projects such as React, TensorFlow and Kubernetes, as absent from the conversation. The best those people can do, he wrote, is allocate to Bitcoin on their balance sheets, and they will be late to that too. The host called it unironically bullish.
even though we are over $100,000, the vast majority of the world is completely asleep at the wheel
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:01
Then and now
The episode went out on May 12, 2025, when Bitcoin was $103,730. Today it is $80,673. The $200,000 to a million dollar range the host used for his example has not arrived, and the price is below where it stood that Monday.
The Mining Disrupt News Surge is a weekly studio show. The full episode is linked on this page.