The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, April 1, 2024 opened with a nod to April Fool's Day and a countdown. As of that morning the halving was scheduled for April 20, 2024 at 10:37 a.m., and the host said the outer ring on the timechain calendar he works from would only flash faster as the date got closer.
It was a studio show, not a conference session. Before the stories he pointed viewers to tickets for Mining Disrupt 2024 in Miami, June 24 through 26, and asked anyone interested in sponsoring to get in touch.
The numbers
There would be one more difficulty adjustment before the halving. With about 1,500 blocks to go, the host read the projected change as a barely noticeable upward tick, with blocks arriving on average every 9 minutes and 58 seconds. Bitcoin was $69,534 that day.
An April Fool's warm-up
The first item was a joke. Michael Saylor had posted a piece of art with the line that Bitcoin is the signal, and the host said something in its shape looked familiar to him. He left viewers to decide what it looked like, and came back to it at the end of the show.
Iceland and inflation
The first serious item came by way of BTC David, who had shared a news report in which Iceland's prime minister called Bitcoin a worldwide problem. The host apologised in advance for how he would pronounce her name, then agreed with her up to a point. Bitcoin is a problem for a narrow group, he said, but not for you or me or 99% of the world. For him it was the one tool he knew of that gives ordinary people a way out.
it's for the whole world to give us a chance of escaping the theft that is inflation
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 2:03
Energy, AI and a Pennsylvania plant
From there he moved to energy. Vox had run a piece saying AI already uses as much energy as a small country, and that it is only the beginning. The host's point was about who complains. Bitcoin's critics, he said, had spent years calling its energy use horrible, and he did not see the same people treating AI's use as a problem, even though it looks set to use far more.
What he wanted instead was an example like the one he read next, from Pennsylvania. Dave McCormick, then running for the US Senate, had posted about a visit to Stronghold Digital Mining's Panther Creek Plant. In the post, McCormick described the 20-year-old plant as originally used in support of the [anthracite] mining industry, and said the power generation facility and Bitcoin mining operation was designed to solve the state's mining waste problems through a reclamation-to-energy process.
cleaning things up while generating power that's the kind of thing that we need
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 3:19
He said he was not sure whether the plant also supplies power to people in the area. His wider point was reuse: put existing power plants and infrastructure to good use.
The ETF tally
The longest item was the spot ETF story, which he said had been all the rage for a couple of months. He read a post from [HODL15Capital] titled the Bitcoin zero sum, which tallied flows since the US Bitcoin ETFs launched on January 10, 2024. By that count, GBTC had sold 271,000 bitcoin, while the new ETFs had bought 475,000. The post also gave figures for bitcoin mined and for coins sold by everyone else, but the captions garbled both, so they are left out here.
The host's reading was about supply. GBTC holders have only so many shares to sell, he said, and the number was dwindling every day. Once those ran out, buyers would be left with shares that other holders chose to sell, which he said was not happening much, and with newly mined coins. And a little over two weeks later, on the 20th, the number of new coins mined each day would be cut in half.
He stressed the size of the cut: not a 10% reduction, not 25%, but a 50% reduction in what comes to market every single day. On price he hedged, more than once.
it seems like it can only go one way
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 4:44
He added that he did not know, and that viewers would see.
Miners on the move
The halving also drove the next item. Bloomberg reported that miners were shipping rigs from the US to Africa and South America before the halving, with more than half a million S19 machines, 600,000 in the report, on the move for cheaper energy. Rigs that once cost around $1,500 each might be worth only $350 after the halving.
The host tied it back to his energy point: the answer is not cutting consumption but finding more ways to produce. Miners go wherever the cheapest energy is, he said, because a site needs a team and some infrastructure but not a large workforce, and the machines can be packed up, shipped and running in new racks before long.
you can't move a gold mine once it's there
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 6:03
Custody, prison and a clip from China
Two exchange stories followed. One of the two executives detained in Nigeria on alleged tax evasion and other offenses had escaped from lawful custody, which the host said he could not explain. And Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, had been sentenced to 25 years in prison. His advice to the industry was to stop playing games and focus on one thing.
just buy Bitcoin and chill out or mine it and chill out
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 6:43
He then played a clip said to be from Chinese state TV, from 3 years earlier, when Bitcoin was at $40,000. In it, a commentator warned that if Bitcoin became the ultimate form of currency, we are all going to die. The host said he could not tell whether the clip was real, dubbed over or a joke, and could not see how anyone would justify the claim if it was meant seriously.
Hail on a solar field
He returned to energy one last time with helicopter footage from Texas, where fields of solar panels had been hit by a hailstorm. He asked who pays for the damage, who fixes it, whether the broken glass and plastic left on the land is good for the environment, and how long replacement would take. For him it was energy done badly, set against the Pennsylvania plant he had praised earlier.
He closed by saying his job is to cover the news as honestly and clearly as he can, and to call things what they are. Then he went back to the Saylor post from the top of the show and left the joke where it started.
Then and now
The episode went out on April 1, 2024, when Bitcoin was $69,534. Today it is $80,839. The halving the host counted down to has since passed, and the price sits above where it stood that Monday.
The Mining Disrupt News Surge is a weekly studio show. The full episode is linked on this page.