At Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, held March 25–27, 2025, a fireside chat on money and mining put two long-time bitcoiners in front of an audience of miners. Lawrence Lepard has been an investment manager his whole career and wrote The Big Print, a book he says is meant to help newcomers understand Bitcoin. CJ Konstantinos is the founder of People's Reserve. Both said they came to Bitcoin around 2013; Lepard had been in gold before that, which he called the only choice at the time.
The moderator set out why the macro picture matters to this audience: margins are tightening, staying alive as a miner is harder than ever, and operators need a view of where the market is going in order to plan.
Why Lepard expected a big print
Lepard's case starts with arithmetic. Debt cannot keep growing faster than the GDP that supports it, so the Federal Reserve will eventually be forced to print. He counted two earlier prints, after the 2000 bubble and the financial crisis, and said a third was coming. Each morning he checks four prices: gold, Bitcoin, the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond and the stock market. In March 2025 the stock market was the one sending warning signals.
The stock market is down 10% off its high.
Lawrence Lepard · 3:54
He described stocks as a bubble that was starting to roll over, and said bubbles do not deflate gradually. He had managed money through both of the last two bubbles. His expectation for the following six months was a stock market decline of 20%, 30% or 40%, and he warned the room that the first part of it would be bad for Bitcoin too, because the market still treated Bitcoin like a liquidity trade rather than a safe haven.
His sequence ran like this. Stocks would break decisively through their 200-day moving average, tariffs would make people cut back, and the Fed would gain cover to lean toward printing. Powell had already taken quantitative tightening from $25 billion down to $5 billion. Lepard did not think the bottom of Bitcoin's correction, from $106,000 to the mid-80s, was in. He expected a brief drop to somewhere between 70K and 79K, followed by a run to 140 by the end of the year.
Later in the session he put numbers on the debt. The U.S. Treasury had to roll over $7 trillion of debt that year, the debt balance was approaching $37 trillion, and he put unfunded liabilities, mostly Medicare, at another $220 trillion. When people decide the debt is no good, he said, they sell it, rates rise, the economy slows, and the Fed does the one thing it knows how to do.
A zombie economy and Bitcoin as collateral
Konstantinos agreed that printing was unavoidable. He described a zombie stock market feeding into a zombie economy: the government borrows and prints, spends the money back into the economy, and does not get back the dollar plus interest it needs, so debt-to-GDP gets worse rather than better.
And as Bitcoin miners, what you guys do is you secure the most valuable engineered money, pristine form of collateral in the world.
CJ Konstantinos · 7:00
His answer was to put Bitcoin on the national balance sheet and treat it as collateral rather than a risk-on tech stock. He pointed to El Salvador, saying the country has some of the best performing traditional bonds in the world because it added Bitcoin to its balance sheet. That is his reading; he cited no figures.
He tied it to his own company. People's Reserve, he said, is built on the idea that borrowing currency that loses value against money that gains value produces what he calls Bitcoin yield: not interest from lending coins out, but a smaller burden of debt over time. Lepard pushed back on one point. Where Konstantinos said Bitcoin is not fighting the dollar, Lepard said that on a full Bitcoin standard the dollar would be finished, and that it should be.
Difficulty, cost of production and proof of work
Asked what policymakers get wrong about proof of work, Konstantinos said they treat Bitcoin as a risk-on asset, no different from borrowing against Tesla shares. The design shows in the halving and in the difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks. Rising hashrate pushes up the cost of production, and he called cost of production the reference point for price discovery: added hashrate drives value into the network.
Proof of work is really nothing more than the biblical saying of you reap what you sow, right?
CJ Konstantinos · 12:29
Fiat, in his framing, is reaping without sowing, eating the seed corn, a system built on proof of promise. He said the foundation needs to move from debt to an equity layer such as gold, silver and Bitcoin.
Sell above cost, buy below it
The practical advice was for the miners in the room. Konstantinos said miners have an inside track that other holders lack: they know their cost of production, and unlike people who only stack coins, they have bills to pay. A strict hold-everything treasury only works for companies that can raise funding from U.S. capital markets.
you should be locking in profits when you have a premium to your cost.
CJ Konstantinos · 18:15
The cash set aside that way is what lets a miner buy when price falls below cost, acting as the buyer of last resort the way the Fed is the lender of last resort. In his words, a miner should mine with the treasury as well as the hashrate. Every site has a different cost basis, he said, and revenue from heat capture can reduce how much Bitcoin an operator has to sell. He spoke from experience: he tried holding everything and was knocked out of mining in 2016 after the halving.
Lepard's tool: the Mayer Multiple
Lepard said his first step would be a line of credit for hard times. His second was a simple measure developed by Trace Mayer: Bitcoin's price against its 200-day moving average. When price is stretched well above that average, 20, 30, 40 or 50 percent, that is the time to sell mined coins. At or below the average, he would draw on credit rather than sell, because price returns to that average through the cycle. He recalled checking his phone on a night flight in December and seeing $106,000; had he been a miner, he said, he would have read that as a time to sell production. At the time of the talk he thought price was sitting around the 200-day average.
What Lepard expected next
On tariffs and federal job cuts, Lepard said the administration was doing things it should do, but compared it to Jenga and to brain surgery, and doubted a gradual landing. For his closing he pointed miners to Andrew Hohns's Bitcoin bond proposal: low-interest government bonds where part of the money raised buys Bitcoin and the gain is shared between the government and the bond buyer. He warned the next three to four months could be rocky.
The good news is I'm pretty sure we're going to be at 140 by December.
Lawrence Lepard · 27:35
Bitcoin traded at $87,393 on March 25, 2025, when the event opened. On October 17, 2026, it trades at $81,466. The conversation continues at Mining Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.