Dennis Porter opened his Mining Disrupt Miami session with a slide of old anti-marijuana advertisements: Reefer Madness, "weed from the devil's garden", warnings that the drug would cause insanity. Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of Satoshi Action, a non-profit, non-partisan group that advocates for Bitcoin miners, used the images to make a point about the attacks on mining in 2023. Another industry had faced the same treatment, he said, and won.
The session was recorded at Mining Disrupt Miami, held July 25–27, 2023, when Bitcoin traded at $29,125. Porter's argument was that miners should stop defending the technology in the abstract and start selling its local benefits to state lawmakers, the way cannabis advocates did.
The Attacks on Mining in 2023
Porter listed the opposition the industry was facing. He showed letters from Congress, including one signed by seven senators saying Bitcoin mining was bad, and the argument that miners using green energy were taking power somebody else could have used. He said the bear market was when critics chose to "come swinging", and named the New York Times among the largest media outlets coming after the industry. The audience booed on cue.
He then turned to cannabis. "You think we got it bad," he said: it was a federal crime to possess, distribute or smoke marijuana, and growers could not get bank accounts. Porter, who is from Portland, Oregon, said he knew people who kept pails of cash because no bank would take it.
The Cannabis Playbook: Tax Money
What changed for cannabis, Porter argued, was not the moral case. In the early 2010s, advocates began making the economic and societal case: growth for communities, lower crime and a larger local tax base. He put two figures on screen, $67 million in Colorado and $580 million in Washington in one year, from taxing something that had been illegal to use and possess.
you one thing policy makers they love tax money coming in but they don't like they really don't like to raise taxes a whole lot
Dennis Porter · 6:44
Lawmakers, he said, would much rather find a new industry to collect from than tell voters their taxes are going up. That gives a new industry leverage if it can show what it brings to a state.
He also described how the idea spread. States are called the laboratory of democracy, he said, because when something works in one state the next one moves to catch up. Cannabis started in blue, progressive states and moved into deep red ones; even Texas tried, and failed, to pass pro-marijuana legislation that year.
Mining's Benefits, Stated Plainly
Porter then set out the benefits he wants miners to bring to statehouses. The first was grid balancing. During Winter Storm Uri in Texas, he said, miners wound down and delivered up to 2,000 megawatts back to the grid in the middle of an emergency.
2 000 megawatts of power is enough energy to heat 2 million small homes
Dennis Porter · 13:00
The second was methane. He pointed to gas miners in the room who convert methane to CO2, and to a federal orphan well program that pays states to plug abandoned wells. Most methane reduction costs money, he said; Bitcoin mining is revenue-generating climate tech. He joked that by the time he had listed methane and grid balancing, policymakers would stop believing it was real.
it's also going to reduce methane emissions like stop while you're ahead
Dennis Porter · 16:49
The third was jobs. Porter told the story of a visit to a Riot facility about a year earlier, where he met an older man named James in the control center. James told him the industry his town had been built on had left years ago, and there had been no opportunity there since. Riot, Porter said, gave him a job no one else was offering, in parts of the country left behind when manufacturing moved overseas.
Right to Mine, State by State
Porter said the industry was already following the cannabis path. In 2023, four states considered right-to-mine bills. Two passed, in Montana and Arkansas; Missouri came razor close, and there was good progress in Mississippi. Getting a second state mattered, he said, because other states watch and follow.
in 2023 four states considered right to mine we ultimately passed it in two Montana and Arkansas
Dennis Porter · 19:40
He also asked miners to make his job easier. Operators who move into a community and start blaring sound without mitigating it will face a backlash, he said, and those communities will get politicians to move against the industry. His request: spend a little extra money on sound mitigation and engage with the community.
Banking Access
Porter's last issue was banking. He asked who in the room had been kicked out of a bank for being a crypto or blockchain company, and hands went up. He said one of the biggest publicly traded miners had been dropped by its bank after years, and that another miner, whose business is only 10 percent Bitcoin mining and is an energy company first, had all its accounts closed, including personal accounts, when Wells Fargo found out about the mining. Satoshi Action would say more at a panel the next day with its policy director, Florida's Office of Financial Regulation, Oklahoma's deputy attorney general and its senior fellow.
Win in the States
Porter closed on where the fight happens. He goes to Washington to educate, he said, but that is not where the industry wins.
DC is not where we win this game we win it in States like Florida we win it in States like Texas
Dennis Porter · 24:11
He said mining's path would be the reverse of cannabis: start in the red states, then move to blue states that see grid balancing, environmental cleanup and economic impact and want it within their borders. He asked attendees to pick up Satoshi Action's one-pager at Booth 75, next to Hash House, and hand it to their own representatives. The cannabis industry, he said, won because it stayed persistent and consistent with a clear message at the state level.
When this session was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $29,125; on October 13, 2026 it was $83,490. Mining Disrupt returns March 22–24, 2027, in Irving, Texas.