Knots, Core and a Harvard Economist

A Harvard economist once said Bitcoin was more likely to be worth one hundred dollars than one hundred thousand. On the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, August 25, 2025, the host read that economist's own look back at the call, then turned to a fight closer to home: Bitcoin Core against Bitcoin Knots. When the episode was published, Bitcoin traded at one hundred eleven thousand, one hundred ninety-six dollars. On October 26, 2026 it was seventy-nine thousand, eight hundred forty-seven.

The host started with the network. The mempool was back over one hundred thousand transactions, blocks were arriving on time, and priority fees were still low. Some people, he said, read low fees as a sign that Bitcoin is unhealthy. He thought they might be a sign of something else.

Then came Kenneth Rogoff. In a post the host read aloud, Rogoff said he had been too optimistic about sensible cryptocurrency regulation in the United States, had not seen how Bitcoin would compete with fiat money in the global underground economy, and had not expected regulators to hold so much cryptocurrency themselves. The host was unmoved. Anyone willing to admit what they missed can learn something, he said, and Rogoff did not seem interested.

His loss, our gain. On the node debate, he read two posts. One said the best thing to do was keep stacking sats. The other, from Joe Burnett, said that when everyone is fighting online it is usually a good time to buy Bitcoin.

The host called most of the fighting noise, full of name-calling. His own reading was this: "From what I can tell, the people on the knots side see Bitcoin as a monetary protocol." Knots runners, he said, are voting with their wallet, some buying a node for the first time, less to block spam in practice than to show what they care about. Core supporters, as he understood them, want things a little more open and want the free market to decide. Then he disclosed his own setup.

He runs Knots on his node. He knows the transactions may land on chain anyway. He runs it to tell the network he wants Bitcoin to be a monetary protocol, and nothing more. His pitch for the second Mining Disrupt Expo, at the Irving Convention Center in Dallas, Texas, November 11th through 13th, followed from that.

Go and ask the miners running huge facilities what they think about Core, Knots and spam. Without mining, he said, there is no Bitcoin. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.