News Surge: Stargate and the Texas Grid

Over two hundred thousand transactions stuck in the mempool. Fees climbing to eight sats for priority. That was the picture on the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, September 29, 2025, recorded the Friday before with Bitcoin at $109,044.

The host had a lottery story first. A post from Trey Sellers called it the most depressing thing he had seen on X: a winner in Montreal took one thousand dollars a week instead of a one million dollar lump sum. The host's objection was inflation. "Do you honestly think that in the year 2045, 2044 that her $300,000 is going to buy her the same amount of stuff as it does today?" he asked. His answer was no.

He also checked a prediction. On September 22, a post said Congress would soon report a bipartisan plan for the US government to buy Bitcoin. A day later, nothing. The host thought the bigger story was what President Trump wanted from the Fed, lower interest rates.

There was one more post. Mitchell Askew wrote that a hundred and nine thousand dollars per Bitcoin was now a dip, and called it laughable. The host agreed, said he was going long, and reminded listeners he was only reading the post and that none of it was advice. His own technical analysis, he joked, was to look at the price on the day he recorded.

Then he got to Texas, where the second Mining Disrupt Expo was seven weeks away. He read a post on Stargate, the data center project of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. It put the Abilene site and new projects in Shackelford and Milam counties at more than three gigawatts combined, with at least seven gigawatts announced nationwide, all leaning on the Texas grid. The Abilene facility alone is 1.4 gigawatts, tied into ERCOT and drawing on gas, wind and solar.

The post never mentioned Bitcoin. The host did. He pointed back to the 2021 Texas power crisis and asked why nothing like it had made news since. His answer: the Bitcoin miners in the state. "They have stabilized the grid," he said. A project that size, he argued, does not go where the power fails on a regular basis. The episode offered no grid data for that; it is his reading of the news.

His advice for the price was to zoom out and step away from the noise on X. Bitcoin closed at $112,143 the day the episode aired. On October 27, 2026 it was $80,473.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt dot com, and Mining Disrupt 2027 runs March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.