At Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale 2025, held March 25–27, 2025, a policy panel titled From Bills to Bitcoin put two state lawmakers beside Dennis Porter, CEO and co-founder of Satoshi Action. Pennsylvania State Representative Robert Leadbeter and Michigan House Majority Floor Leader Bryan Posthumus joined him on stage. The moderator, Tom, works with Porter at Satoshi Action. Their shared point was simple: for Bitcoin miners, many of the rules that decide whether a site can operate are written in state capitals, not in Washington.
Porter said he launched Satoshi Action in June 2022 after years of urging people to get active, and that the group went to work at the state level, where he said progress can come in a short period of time.
You know, I often say DC is where dreams go to die.
Dennis Porter · 3:31
He added that the picture in Washington had improved and that Congress might get something done, but the panel spent most of its hour on statehouses.
A bill written by bankers
Leadbeter gave the room a concrete example from the week of the conference. A bill had just passed a committee in Pennsylvania, and he said its language had been written by bankers.
if the piece of legislation that just passed through committee this week in Pennsylvania were enacted into law that the bankers wrote, you would all be subject to money laundering charges.
Robert Leadbeter · 10:42
He said anyone in the room with a self-hosted wallet would be exposed. His work that week, he said, was to address the erroneous language and to work with both the state Senate and the state House so that missteps like this do not happen. Lawmakers who do not understand the issue, he said, see such a bill as keeping money launderers out of their communities, and that ignorance cannot be allowed to drive policy that sets back the industry.
Staff time is scarce in most states
Leadbeter said Pennsylvania has a full-time legislature with 203 members in the state House and 50 in the state Senate, each with assigned staff, and that this is not the standard across the country. Most states, he said, have part-time legislatures.
Posthumus agreed that Pennsylvania and Michigan are among the few with that kind of support. He said he has one staff member who has been dedicated to digital asset, blockchain and crypto policy for the last three months, with about 75% of that person's time spent working out how to roll out legislation on the issue.
Porter said the same logic applies in every office. Lawmakers rely on anywhere from 20 to 50 staff depending on their seniority, and Satoshi Action is often happier to work with the staff than with the lawmaker, who is pulled in many directions.
And so if you want to expect to have an impact in any office, congressional or state level, you really do have to engage staff members.
Dennis Porter · 44:00
Michigan's three-phase package
Posthumus said he announced a three-phase package of digital asset legislation in January. Phase one is anchored by a strategic Bitcoin reserve bill, which had been introduced in the House and was waiting for a committee hearing that he expected in the middle or end of April. He said he had met the committee chair, who would likely join as a sponsor on phase two.
His expectation was that the bill would clear committee in mid-April and the House by the beginning of summer, then hit a roadblock in the state Senate, which he said is controlled by Democrats who do not necessarily share his view on crypto. He stressed that the package is bipartisan and said the Senate majority leader would need education on the subject. Phase two, planned for the second week of April, is anchored by a Bitcoin bill of rights. Phase three, expected toward the end of summer, is meant to address debanking.
He also said government moves slowly by the founders' design, so not every proposal will pass the first time, and that it is the education over a year or two that moves the Overton window.
Pennsylvania's reserve bill
Leadbeter described his Keystone Digital Asset Custody Fund bill, a strategic Bitcoin reserve proposal that he said could not have been written without Satoshi Action. He said Pennsylvania has passed budgets billions of dollars over taxable revenue in each of the last two budget cycles, and that its rainy day fund continues to be depleted. At a 2% inflation rate, he said, the half-life of that money is about 35 or 36 years. A Bitcoin reserve, in his view, lets states act as better fiduciaries for taxpayer dollars. He said one of his reasons is his two young daughters.
Energy, zoning and the 10th Amendment
Asked why miners should care about state policy at all, Porter said the vast majority of energy policy happens at the state level: power rates, grid balancing programs and the development of RTOs and ISOs. A miner who wants a state to offer grid balancing programs like the ones in Texas, which he called an incredible revenue driver for miners there, has to engage locally. Much of that work happens at the public utility or public service commission, a separate body that Satoshi Action lobbies directly.
Posthumus framed it through the 10th Amendment, which leaves to the states what the Constitution does not assign to the federal government. In Michigan, he said, a township can tell a miner they cannot mine Bitcoin in an area zoned industrial, even though a quarry could operate there. He said he is working to limit local governments' power to block mining.
we're trying to advance policies that at the state level that the federal government just has zero control over, nor should they have control over.
Bryan Posthumus · 21:24
Leadbeter put the energy question in terms of base load. He cited a Goldman Sachs report that expects data center and energy growth over the next decade to exceed the growth of the last century. In his region of Pennsylvania, he said, a single county has enough coal to power the Commonwealth for the next hundred years. He said he was not asking anyone to become pro-coal, only to understand that the United States has the natural gas, oil, coal and alternative generation to meet that demand.
Nebraska, Idaho and Satoshi Action's model bills
Porter said an influential lawmaker in Nebraska was pushing a bill to put an excise tax directly on Bitcoin miners, which he said would be close to fatal given their thin margins. Satoshi Action was bringing stakeholders together to fight it. The moderator thanked miners at the conference who had testified at the state capitol against the bill, which would have set a 2.5 cent excise tax per kilowatt-hour; he said some miners told him their tax bill would have jumped to north of $5 million overnight. The panel did not say how the bill ended.
Porter said Satoshi Action's Bitcoin rights bill goes beyond a general right to mine and names specific forms of discrimination, including rezoning and noise limits aimed only at miners.
But all of a sudden, we started seeing these bills that were like Bitcoin miners have to have a lower decibel level than any other industry.
Dennis Porter · 27:29
Rate schedules are another target. Porter said Idaho was the first state to create a special rate for miners that was much higher than the standard large load rate, and Satoshi Action wrote its model policy in response. When the group went back to Idaho to pass that policy, he said, the energy companies pushed back and Satoshi Action “went to war” with them.
How to get involved
Asked what a mining company should do first, Posthumus said that if you are not at the table, you are on the table, because special interests pull at every policy idea. He urged miners to build a relationship with their state representative or member of Congress and to be persistent.
In politics, the squeaky wheel gets to grease.
Bryan Posthumus · 10:38
Bitcoin was at $87,393 on March 25, 2025, the first day of the conference. On October 17, 2026, it was $81,466. The Pennsylvania and Michigan bills discussed on stage were described as they stood that week.