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Can BlackRock Change Bitcoin?
The December 23, 2024 News Surge follows Riot and Hut 8 buying Bitcoin, then uses a Magic: The Gathering deck to explain why a fork would not be Bitcoin.
This story is an episode of the Bitcoin Radio podcast.Six copies of the same card in one Magic: The Gathering deck. That is how the host of the Mining Disrupt News Surge chose to answer a question about BlackRock on Monday, December 23, 2024.
That week a BlackRock video called Bitcoin's 21 million supply a hard-coded rule, and a small remark in it led some viewers to wonder whether the cap could be changed. On the day the episode was recorded, Bitcoin closed at $95,804. On October 26, 2026 it was $80,123.
The news half of the show followed corporate buying. Riot used the proceeds of an upsized $594 million convertible bond issue to buy more Bitcoin. Hut 8 announced it had bought approximately 990 Bitcoin for approximately $100 million, taking its strategic reserve above 10,000 Bitcoin. Zack Herbert of Foundation Devices posted that a reserve should not come first, and that ending capital gains tax should. And Eric Yakes answered a skeptic who doubted that a node on a Raspberry Pi could stop BlackRock from uncapping the supply. Wars, he wrote, will be won with your little node.
The host took that up in his opinion segment. He said that when he first got into Bitcoin, he asked what would happen if a state, a fund or a billionaire bought a million nodes and ran its own version under the name true Bitcoin. His answer came as a card game. Say a player loves one card so much that he puts six copies in every deck and says this is how the format is now played. In the host's words: "I have 10,000 decks each one with six Dragon rage Channeler." The other players shrug. That is not how the game is played at any sanctioned tournament.
Bitcoin, he argued, is the same. A node running the actual code holds the real thing, no matter how many nodes run a copy with new rules. "They can change the code to be 42 million coins, they could change it to be 100 million coins, but there will still only be that one true Bitcoin."
He said he did not read the BlackRock remark as a plan, and that he might be naive. He did not think a firm focused on making money would damage the asset it holds. His advice was a trifecta: run your own node, mine with a small solo miner, and keep your own keys.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.