Block's Proto Rig and the Halving Countdown

Just shy of 140,000. That was the number on an orange ring on the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, August 18, 2025, and the host called it one of the most important numbers in Bitcoin. It was the count of blocks left until the next halving, when the mining subsidy falls from 3.125 bitcoin to half that.

That day Bitcoin closed at $115,051. On October 26, 2026 it stood at $79,849.

Before any of that, the host described a market stuck in a loop. Week after week, he said, Bitcoin kept bouncing back to the same range: 116, then 117, then 115, then a jump to 124 before it fell back on news. Fees, in his words, were still low as ever. In the Proto launch photos he spotted a familiar face, a builder he called the Bitaxe man, a nod to the small open-source home miner.

The episode led with hardware. Block, Jack Dorsey's company, had launched the Proto Rig, a miner with hashboards that can be swapped out instead of replacing the whole machine. The host read Proto's own announcement on air: "Today marks the end of RIP and replace Bitcoin mining." Proto says the swappable boards save 15 to 20 percent with each cycle and that the rig works with existing facility setups. Those are the company's claims, read from its post. A thread the host shared said there are benefits for anyone buying one machine or thousands, but that the big industrial players gain the most.

Then came politics. Bo Hines, the official who had kept telling conferences that the United States wanted as much Bitcoin as it could get, had resigned. A post the host read pointed out that no law had passed for the government to buy Bitcoin, and that it had not bought a single sat. The host would not guess why Hines left. "We don't know if he was let go," he said. "We don't know if he was fired." His point was that it did not matter.

In fact, he argued, the government not buying Bitcoin was good news for ordinary savers. Picture the United States buying five bitcoin every day, he said, and the price could move out of reach of regular people, who would decide they had missed the train. He expected $500,000 or a million sooner than most people think.

He closed where the show often closes: "What matters is that you transform your time and energy into something that somebody else can't print for free for the cost of a button press."

The full story, with the video, is on miningdisrupt.com in the magazine's hardware section.