We Must Mine: What Kent Told Bitcoin Medellín

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Example

At Bitcoin Medellín, our CEO Kent Halliburton made a case that is easy to miss if you only think about mining as “an industry.”

His point was simpler, and bigger: Bitcoin is not just a decentralized ledger, it is also a decentralized money printer, and if Bitcoiners do not participate in that production layer, we leave a critical piece of the network to incentives that are not Bitcoin-first.

Below are the key takeaways from the talk, explained in a fresh, practical way.

1) Bitcoin introduced a decentralized money printer

The moment Bitcoin’s first block was mined, a second invention became real: a monetary system where new supply is produced by anyone with energy and hardware, without asking permission.

That framing matters because it shifts mining from “optional” to foundational. If you care about Bitcoin’s long-term resilience, you care about who owns production.

2) “Mining amnesia” is a real problem, and it grew naturally

Kent described a cultural split most people can feel but rarely name: Bitcoin conferences often have very few miners, and mining conferences often have very few Bitcoiners. The result is what he called mining amnesia, where most Bitcoiners do not understand mining experientially, and mining becomes a boogeyman.

He traced the timeline:

Early Bitcoiners often ran nodes and mined, there was no separation
ASICs made mining harder, at the same time buying got easier via exchanges

When mining becomes “something other people do,” the average Bitcoiner loses the feel for how the network is actually secured and produced.

3) Centralization is the risk hiding in plain sight

Kent did not sugarcoat the current concentration risks.

He cited two pool entities, AntPool and Foundry, representing 44% of hash rate, and pointed out why that concentration matters at the protocol level.
He also called out Bitmain’s dominance in hardware production, citing roughly 70% of hardware being produced.

His conclusion was not doom, it was responsibility: these are the kinds of structural pressures that explain the title of the talk, we must mine.

4) The economic case is simpler than most people think

Kent’s “make it simple” mining lens was this: What does it cost to run a rig, and what do you get back?

He used an example from a current offering and put a plain benchmark on it: an energy cost of Bitcoin around $53,000 per BTC mined (not that you mine a full BTC at once).

Then he tied it to a concept we care about deeply: wild sats, sats produced outside the banking system, and how customers often treat them differently than purchased sats.

5) We are moving from a buy phase to an earn phase

Kent zoomed out using Gresham’s Law: people hoard the good money and spend the bad, which creates real psychological friction around spending Bitcoin today.

He also pointed to a key behavioral signal: exchange balances falling as price rises, suggesting hoarding is accelerating.
From there, he argued we are heading toward a transition from “buy” to earn, and that mining is the cleanest, most direct way to earn Bitcoin over time.

6) Time horizon is the whole game

Kent used the Milan Cathedral as an anchor, a project that took 569 years to build, to make one point: Bitcoin demands a longer horizon than most modern finance is capable of.

If we care about the separation of money and state lasting for generations, we also need a Bitcoin community that owns the “means of production,” not just the asset.

How we think about making mining accessible

Kent briefly summarized our model in Medellín: customers can buy hardware, we operate it in our data centers, costs are passed through, and we take a 15% management fee, keeping incentives aligned because we only win when customers produce sats.