Stories · as read on the Mining station
Bitcoin's Eight-Year Clock
A June 9, 2025 News Surge episode counts back in eight-year steps to 1971 and points ahead to the halving that cuts the block reward below one bitcoin.
Block 900,065. That was the count on the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, June 9, 2025, a little over 16 years after the first Bitcoin block was mined in January 2009. Bitcoin had just dipped toward $100,000 and bounced back to about $104,000, and a dollar bought less than a thousand sats.
The host spent the rest of the solo episode on an idea he said he had just stumbled on: that big political and monetary shocks arrive about every eight years, and that the next one lines up with a Bitcoin halving.
It started with a post from on-chain analyst Willy Woo, who asked, quote, "Who are the idiots that are selling when institutions and sovereigns are racing to buy billions in Bitcoin?" Woo's chart showed that wallets holding more than 10,000 bitcoin had been selling since 2017, mostly coins bought for under $700 and held for eight to 16 years.
Eight years, the host said, is the unit. Count back from 2025 and you reach the 2016 election, when people started paying attention to how politics works. Another eight years and you reach the 2008 financial crisis. Keep going and he lists the Gulf War, Reagan's landslide and Chernobyl, then Watergate and the fall of Saigon. All of it, he argued, followed 1971, when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard.
His view of today is that the question has moved from politics to money. People are asking whether what they store their wealth in matters. He read one post that said peace of mind comes from Bitcoin in cold storage, not from slaving harder for printed dollars.
Then he looked forward. Eight years on from 2025 sits the halving that cuts the block reward from more than one bitcoin to less than one. By then more than 99 percent of all bitcoin will have been mined, and the last percent will trickle out over about a hundred years. He said many countries dropping their local currency for Bitcoin did not seem far-fetched to him, and pointed to companies adding bitcoin to their balance sheets and to the restaurant chain Steak 'n Shake taking it as payment.
He called it a prediction, not a certainty. When the episode aired, Bitcoin was at $107,751. Today it is $80,251.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.