The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, February 24, 2025 ran its usual format: a short promo for the Mining Disrupt Expo, a look at the Bitcoin numbers, one post for each day of the week, and an opinion segment. That week the opinion segment was a warning. The host said two social engineering attacks were going around, that one of them had slipped under the radar, and that viewers could be at risk of losing everything without knowing it. He added that he was not being hyperbolic.
He also gave his standing reminder that the show is not the place for financial advice. His screen showed Bitcoin near $96,000. The number he chose to point out was the public node count, about 21,000, which he said he had never seen above 22,000. He tied the opinion segment to what he called the trifecta of self-custody, running your own node and home mining, and told newcomers that of the three, self-custody is the one not to skip.
The scam: a collaboration request, then an app
The attack he described came from a post by Seb Bunny, whom he introduced as a prominent Bitcoiner who started or helped co-found Looking Glass Education, a Bitcoin education website. The host stressed that Bunny is no beginner with computers, and that the scam is reaching people like him.
basically what happens and this can happen to anybody
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:20
The steps, as he summarised them: someone sends a direct message on X asking to collaborate. The target agrees to talk. The next message is an invite to authorize an app that can do things like post on the target's behalf. Most users have seen prompts like it and click accept without a second thought. The host said X lets users review which apps they have given permission to, but that the permission gives the app more access than most people realize. He did not walk through the full technical detail and pointed viewers to the post itself.
He said the post had only 57 bookmarks, 205 likes, just shy of 100 reposts and 27 comments, which he took as a sign that the scam was not as well known as it should be. He also rejected the idea that attackers only go after large accounts: Bunny had fewer than 10,000 followers, far below the audiences of the best-known Bitcoin commentators.
Code that works as written
The week's posts set up the segment. On Friday he read a post from Jason P. Lowery arguing that code is never broken in a hack; it does exactly what it is told, and the root cause of cyber security incidents is people exploiting the encoded logic. The host agreed. Lowery's post ended with a wish for network security built on a physical cost to the attacker, rather than on encoded logic. The host said the post tied directly to both the Bybit hack and his own opinion segment.
Saturday's post, from Carl B. Menger, was about the Bybit hack. The host picked out Adam Back's reply about blind signing and a joke reply that summed up the failure: a signer who does not read the document, signs it, and is thanked for the 1.4 billion. In the opinion segment the host said he did not think most viewers needed to worry about the Bybit hack itself. He mentioned North Korea and the Lazarus group as possible culprits, but said the picture was still unclear.
Seed words stay off every device
His takeaway was that the X scam is survivable for anyone whose coins are already in self-custody and cold storage.
as long as you have your Bitcoin in Cold Storage in self- custody then you're going to be good
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:02
The risk he described is what an attacker can reach once inside an account or a computer. He told viewers not to keep seed words in a notepad file on a computer, in an email or in Google Drive, and to keep them far away from any digital device. An attacker with access to a machine can scan it for groups of 12 words that look like a seed phrase, and the wallet is empty the next time its owner checks.
do not have those seed words on a notepad on your computer
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:13
Home mining and the expo
The episode opened with the Mining Disrupt Expo, then about four weeks away and moving from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The host named Ben from BTC Sessions and Scott of Bitaxe fame among the speakers, and said he wanted to ask Scott about a new Bitaxe with 12 ASIC chips. He pictured a day when people walk into a big-box store, pick a $50 or $200 home miner, plug it in and take a chance at the 3.125 BTC block reward. Wednesday's post came from Solo Satoshi: home miners do not want a $5,000 check, they want to bankrupt the industrial Bitcoin mining complex with open-source mining.
What happened next
Bitcoin closed at $95,836 on February 24, 2025. On October 27, 2026 it traded at $79,780. The advice in the episode does not depend on the price. The host closed by telling viewers to stay vigilant and to find him at the Fort Lauderdale expo.
be vigilant be aware and stay on top of this stuff
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 9:37
Mining Disrupt 2027 runs March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.