The Mining Disrupt News Surge for Friday, August 4, 2023 came out a week after Mining Disrupt 2023 in Miami. The host had four things to cover: an interview from the conference, a dispute over a booth, a KPMG report on Bitcoin mining, and how the event had felt to the people who went.
The episode opens, as the show usually does, with the network.
The network that week
He read the numbers from timechaincalendar.com. The average block time was 9 minutes and 59 seconds, close enough to target that the next difficulty adjustment would be upward by just 0.19. On-chain fees read 18 for high priority and 10 for any time. The halving was 38,000 blocks away, estimated for April 26, 2024, and the 14-day average hashrate was 372.4 exahash.
RFK Jr. on nodes, wallets and his own Bitcoin
The first segment went back to the conversation Dennis Porter of Satoshi Action had on stage at Mining Disrupt 2023 with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then running for president. Porter asked what he could do as president to help Bitcoin adoption. The host said he had edited the answer down to its start and its end.
At the start, Kennedy pointed back to the promises he had made on stage in Miami, including the freedom of people to run their own nodes and control their own wallets. In the part the host cut, he spoke about BlackRock and an ETF. At the end, he talked about making Bitcoin into a currency.
Porter closed with what the host called an amusing question: how many Bitcoin can you bench? Kennedy answered that before the Miami conference he had not owned any, and that people told him to put his money where his mouth was.
I put all that money into buying Bitcoins
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. · 2:44
The money, he said, came from a recent settlement in one of his cases, the Monsanto case. The room applauded.
The host used the clip to make a point about self-custody. When a bank shows you a balance, he said, you have to trust that it is accurate. Most of the time it is, but he pointed to news stories from Lebanon of people being refused their own money or finding their accounts shut.
If you are your own bank and that's what a node allows you to do then you don't have to trust anybody else
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 3:53
He said it was good to hear a presidential candidate say how important that freedom is.
The booth at KuCoin's stand
The second segment came with a warning. The host said that what followed was his opinion alone, not anyone else's.
On July 28, Mining Disrupt posted that it had just learned of a booth squatter at the event, someone never invited or listed as an exhibitor or sponsor, and asked KuCoin to clarify why Worldcoin was at its booth without approval. The host read that as a plain request: the organizers did not understand how it happened and wanted to.
He read two replies. One said the conference should have had people overseeing this and should own how it slipped through the cracks. The other answered that this was exactly what the organizers were doing: someone had slipped in uninvited, and they had found the person and called it out.
He then played a short clip from the floor, in which a visitor asked whether the device was durable and was told it would break if dropped. And he pointed to a KuCoin notice dated July 27 telling users that its cross margin trading platform had added the Worldcoin asset and trading pair. That was the last day of the conference, the same day the Worldcoin representative was seen at KuCoin's booth. He called the timing interesting, to say the least, and left it there.
His own view was about the iris scans, not the token.
I am a proponent of the free market if you want to go and put your money into whatever then have at it
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:10
I definitely think it is a very sick idea to be scanning people's eyes
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 7:21
He objected to taking something as personal as iris data and paying people what he called a pittance for it.
Free market, yes, he said. Preying on poor and desperate people, no.
KPMG and the energy argument
He wanted to end on a positive note. The narrative around Bitcoin was shifting, he said, and the basic fact is that Bitcoin miners want cheap energy.
That week KPMG had published a report on the benefits Bitcoin mining can have for the environment. He introduced KPMG as one of the big four accounting firms, with Ernst & Young, Deloitte and PwC, and a network of firms in over 145 countries and a little over a quarter million employees. When they talk, he said, people listen.
He went through the report's three points. Mining rigs give off heat that can be put to work, such as heating a greenhouse. Miners can capture methane that would otherwise burn off and turn it into Bitcoin. And they can use renewable energy. People in mining already know this, he said, and his message to them was to keep doing what is useful.
He added that the world still needs fossil fuels. He cited Elon Musk saying the country could not switch entirely to renewables tomorrow, and guessed that electric vehicles are perhaps five percent of cars on the road, and could not be more than ten. Miners, in his view, should take energy wherever they can find it, and shut down and move on when hospitals, homes or other uses need that power.
How the conference felt
He closed with a walkthrough of the floor posted by the Tech Hustler, and with what people who attended told him.
The conference had so much positive Buzz that people forgot that they were in a bear Market
Mining Disrupt News Surge host · 10:32
He had heard that people were enjoying themselves too much to check the Bitcoin price, and that there were more exhibitors than the year before, which he took as a sign that people were building new cooling systems and other technology for mining. He pointed viewers to Mining Disrupt 2024 in Miami, June 24 to 27. Mining Disrupt 2027 runs March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.
When this episode was published, Bitcoin traded at $29,149. On October 26, 2026 it was $80,035.