THE MINING POD: ERCOT’s 266 GW Surge, IREN’s $2.3B Raise, GPUs > ASICs, Whatsminer M70

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4.8 • 689 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week in bitcoin mining news, ERCOT sees a 266 GW of interconnection requests in 2026, IREN closed a $2.3 billion convertible note offering, and GPUs are leaving ASICs in the dust. Subscribe to the Blockspace newsletter for market-making news as it hits the wire! Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today, Ethan Vera, COO of Luxor, joins us as we dive into MicroBT’s Whatsminer M70 launching into a challenging ASIC market, IREN’s $2.3 billion convertible note offering, the precarious state of hashprice, Luxor’s new GPU hardware sales business, the staggering 270% leap in ERCOT interconnection requests, and the controversial Cat bitcoin fork proposal aimed at filtering ordinals / inscriptions. Subscribe to the newsletter! https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.com **Notes:** - Hash price is below $40 per second - Three negative difficulty adjustments - Ercot requests leaped 270% in 2025 - 73% of requests from data centers - IREN raised $2.3B in convertible notes - M70 efficiency: 12.5 J/TH 00:00 Start 02:35 Difficulty Report by Luxor 07:26 IREN note 10:44 M70 launch 20:02 Luxor launches GPU trading 27:12 ERCOT LL requests up 270% in 2025 34:10 Cry Corner: another filter fork proposal 👉CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin Miner! CleanSpark (Nasdaq: CLSK) is a market-leading data center developer with a proven track record of success. We own a portfolio of power, land, and data centers across the United States powered by globally competitive energy prices. Sitting at the intersection of Bitcoin, energy, operational excellence and capital stewardship, we optimize our infrastructure to deliver superior returns to our shareholders. Monetizing low-cost, high reliability energy by producing a global emerging critical resource – compute – positions us to prosper in an ever-changing world. 👉 FBOX, Cooling for Bitcoin Mining and the AI Data Center Transformation FBOX is the global leader in cooling system manufacturing, with the #1 shipment volume of bitcoin mining containers worldwide. Not only powering for the strongest hashrate, their technology also helps mining infrastructure transform into AI data centers. Backed by the largest production scale on earth, global deployment capability, and a full range of cooling solutions, they are shaping the future of compute. 👉 Luxor, Leaders In Bitcoin Mining and Compute Power! Get game-changing mining results with Luxor Firmware. Boost hashrate, cut energy costs, protect your hardware, and maximize mining profits with LuxOS. Published twice weekly, "The Mining Pod" interviews the best builders and operators in the Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining landscape. Subscribe to get notifications when we publish interviews on Tuesday and a news show on Friday!

Transcript

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0:00.0	But when you look at the market, it is terrible timing.
0:02.6	There's a lot of used S21 pros and other S21 class out there in the market. Like, that's just hard market to compete into. A lot of folks that are talking about this pivot out of AI, right? Like BitFarms and Terowulf and others have announced it. I think that's maybe a little bit overblown at this point. because if these companies go to market with their entire fleets, let's call it 250 X a hash worth of machines, they're going to slip the market pricing by upwards of 50%. There's no buyer of 250x a hatch worth of machines out there.
0:32.6	Basically, they're not going to be able to realize any value on the sale of their machines, really.
0:36.6	And it's better for them to continue to run those machines however they can, rather than fully pivot out. So they're going to keep their machines running at the sites that, say, don't have fiber connection or don't have enough power up time to run HPC workloads. Because, yeah, if they all come to market at the same time, that the market is just going to bottom out, an AC crisis or basically going to zero.
1:02.9	Interconnection requests in ERCOT have leaped 270% so far in 2025 as data center operators pour into the lone star state. You're listening to the mining pod brought to you by CleanSpark,
1:07.7	and for today's news roundup, we cover how much AI demand is actually popping
1:11.9	off in Texas currently. We look at the M70 launch from What's Minor, Irons' recent rays. And we also
1:18.4	have Ethan Vera on from Luxor to talk about their new GPU hardware sales line. And for this
1:23.8	week's Cry Corner, another filter soft fork. Yes, we hate to break the news to you if you haven't heard it already.
1:29.6	We'll get to those stories right after a quick word from our sponsors. You're listening to the mining pod.
1:34.9	Guys, there is a serious problem right now in Bitcoin mining. We need to talk about it. You need to pay attention to this.
1:41.1	Bitcoin miners are identifying as AI companies and people keep mis-sectoring them because
1:46.7	they say, well, look, your infrastructure is clearly for Bitcoin mining. What do you want me to do about
1:51.5	it? I'm going to tell you what you need to do. You need to call F-box, the leading digital
1:57.1	infrastructure company with all-encompassing cooling solutions.
2:05.5	F-box designs industry-leading air, hydro, and emerging cooling systems for Bitcoin mining and AI and HBC data centers.
2:07.5	I want to highlight that.
2:08.4	If you're a Bitcoin miner who needs to bridge the gap, if you're pivoting or doing hybrid
2:12.4	operations, they can build cooling solutions and infrastructure for both your Bitcoin
2:16.6	mining and your
2:17.7	AI and HBC operations.
2:20.3	And they have an in-house API that lets you monitor it from the web or on mobile.
	...

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