Miners Kept Hashing as the Host Pointed at Binance

Blocks every eight minutes and fifty seconds. That is what the Mining Disrupt News Update showed on Friday, August 25, 2023, while the price of Bitcoin was sliding. That day Bitcoin traded at $26,085. On October 25, 2026 it was $80,064.

The host opened with the network. The fourteen-day hashrate average stood at 402 exahash per second, and the single-day figure at 445. Difficulty had jumped 6.17% at the August 22 adjustment, a new peak, even though the price had fallen 10% the week before. His explanation was simple. "It just goes to show that there is always a lag in the system," he said. No fund or group can see every moving part of the economy, but anyone can see that miners kept switching machines on. In his words, miners were "churning out over 400 exahash, pumping power into the Bitcoin network on a daily basis."

The second story was about garbage. Nodal Power, a mining startup, had raised $13 million to turn landfill gas into Bitcoin. Its co-founder, Matthew Jones, described mining to Decrypt as a fallback for when selling to the grid did not pay. The company ran two mining data centers in the United States and planned a third. The host then read Daniel Batten, who wrote that 75% of landfills cannot sell their power to the grid and must use it on site. Miners, the host said, could arrive with trucks of machines and be plugged in within days, a week at most.

Then the price. The host walked through five theories from Jesse Myers on why Bitcoin had sold off: leverage built up while the price sat between 29K and 31K, liquidation hunting, Bitcoin as a fire alarm for global markets, big players selling to buy GBTC, and Binance. "I'm going to skip on to what I think is the most likely reason," he said, and named Binance, trying not to collapse like FTX or Terra Luna. Citing Joe Consorti, he said Binance was selling Bitcoin to stave off failure, in all likelihood including customer coins. He was clear that he wanted the bad actors out but nobody hurt. "I want the free market to succeed," he said.

Binance did not collapse. Later that year it settled with United States authorities, and Changpeng Zhao stepped down as chief executive.

The host closed on self-custody, with a grocery store. You would not pay for your food and leave it on the shelf, hoping it is still there when you come back. "There's no reason for the grocery store to hang on to your food once you've paid for it," he said. Most people buy their first Bitcoin on an exchange. His point was that they do not have to leave it there. Bring your corn home, he said, and he signed off for the weekend.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.