The sea breeze rolled in warm and thick off the Intracoastal as we pulled up to the Broward County Convention Center for Mining Disrupt 2025—its most polished iteration yet. Palm fronds danced in the parking lot winds while pastel-painted walls and neon windows glow reminded me that in South Florida, even hard industry wears a party shirt.
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For the first time, the conference left behind the grungy, fragmented layout of the Miami Airport Convention Center. This year, everything was under one roof—main stage, vendor booths, media, and all. No more weaving between floors and forgotten side rooms. The whole affair was smoother, more professional, more ambitious.
Wearing my GorillaPool hat (figuratively, not literally), I spent some time catching up with old friends and some respectful rivals, many of whom I’ve known since the wilder days of the early 2012-13 ASIC mining boom. If there’s one place where big blockers and small blockers mostly lay down their ideological swords, it’s here. In mining, everyone is bound by the same hash price and economic gravity. We’re infrastructure people, after all.
Interestingly, that’s exactly where most of the money is being made.
Putting my CoinGeek hat back on to investigate the industry as a whole, I realized a disturbing reality was coming more into focus: money is not being made from Bitcoin mining itself but from adjacent services and clever financial engineering. From ASIC collateralization to carbon credit strategies, it felt like nearly every vendor had found some niche outside pure proof-of-work (PoW).
Bitmain was present but quiet—its booth was heavily manned by Chinese representatives who kept mostly to themselves. Why? Because their machines don’t ROI anymore unless you’re using them to bid for curtailment agreements or to collateralize loans or options to put BTC on the books as a speculative hedge. Pretty rough…
Canaan’s team, on the other hand, was engaging and open, showing off some desktop innovations that piqued real interest. But they were largely selling “mine from home” novelty with no expectation of profit, which is telling—but it’s smart to sell the meme and the dream when real profits are mostly theoretical to the average bitcoiner.
I spent some time in the green room with Samson Mow, who predictably avoided eye contact and declined conversation on and off camera. That’s always the vibe with the small block PR wing, but it was amusingly juxtaposed by how many industry leaders gave me knowing nods and off-the-record admissions: “We get it, Kurt. The chain has to scale, or this whole thing goes bust.”
Everywhere I turned, there was some creative new idea to seek profitability in a space where block rewards no longer carry the business. I had engaging chats with guys like Dennis Porter and Kyle Kemper—conversations that reminded me why the fight is worth it. These are people trying to integrate power markets, hardware finance, and even geopolitics into Bitcoin’s infrastructure because it’s the only calculable way to survive and hopefully thrive in the mining space.
Even the cultural contrasts were on full display. From the soft-lit booth demos to hard sales of industrial electrical panels, you could walk five feet and move from an air-conditioned tech utopia into a gritty negotiation over megawatts, freight logistics, or mobile data centers running off cow methane. Only in South Florida could all of this happen with impromptu podcasts recording under a neon palm tree or next to a fully decorated Cybertruck reminding us all to buy more ASIC rigs!
At the end of the day, it was a joy to shoot content with the team and soak in the peculiar charm of the industry we’re building. Mining Disrupt 2025 didn’t just show off the present state of the mining world—it gave glimpses into its adaptive, duct-taped future. There’s a touch of anxiety in the air, but also ingenuity and a lot of fun.
Beneath all of it, the slow realization is setting in, though: unless we scale and create real on-chain economies, the mining industry will starve or shift completely into a new sector to stay alive.
Still, I left with my optimism intact, albeit a little more measured.
Watch: Gorilla Pool provides end to end solution for ASIC mining
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