RFK Jr., a Booth Squatter and KPMG

"I put all that money into buying Bitcoins." That was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on stage at Mining Disrupt 2023 in Miami, and the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Friday, August 4, 2023 opened with it.

Dennis Porter of Satoshi Action had asked him what he could do as president to help Bitcoin adoption. Kennedy spoke about the freedom to run your own node and control your own wallet, and about making Bitcoin a currency. Asked how many Bitcoin he could bench, he said he had owned none before the Miami conference, and that he put a settlement from the Monsanto case into Bitcoin.

The host's point was self-custody. A bank balance is a number you have to trust, he said, and in Lebanon people were refused their own money. "If you are your own bank," he said, "you don't have to trust anybody else."

Then came the drama, which he said was his opinion alone. On July 28, Mining Disrupt posted that a booth squatter had turned up at KuCoin's stand: Worldcoin, never invited as an exhibitor or sponsor. The host noted that KuCoin had added a Worldcoin trading pair on July 27, the last day of the conference. He backed the free market, but not the iris scans. "I definitely think it is a very sick idea to be scanning people's eyes," he said, for what he called a pittance.

He ended on a KPMG report on Bitcoin mining and the environment: heat put to work in greenhouses, methane that would otherwise burn off, and renewable energy. Bitcoin miners want cheap energy, he said, and can shut down when other uses need the power. He cited Elon Musk saying the country could not switch entirely to renewables tomorrow, and guessed electric vehicles are maybe five percent of the cars on the road. The world still needs every energy source, he said, and miners can take power wherever they find it.

Online, the replies split. One said the conference should own how it slipped through the cracks. Another said that was exactly what the organizers were doing: someone had slipped in uninvited, and they found the person and called it out.

People who attended told him the conference had so much positive buzz that they forgot they were in a bear market, and that there were more exhibitors than the year before.

When the episode was published, Bitcoin traded at $29,149. On October 26, 2026, it was $80,035.

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