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The stories that defined 2025

The following is a list of picks from the Blockspace’s core team, Will Foxley, Charlie Spears, and Colin Harper, for the latest Blockspace podcast.

AI eats all the MWs - link

Indisputably, though, the biggest story for bitcoin mining this year comes as an initialism: AI.

There's no one deal I specifically want to call out. But the larger trend of bitcoin miners expanding to AI basically saved the industry.

It allowed Bitcoin to spin out of a death loop: mine bitcoin as cheaply as possible, but the market's always competing against you. 

Just look at hashprice – it's continuously going down. And there hasn't been much of a shift, even with Bitcoin price going downwards the latter half of the year, or at least since October. 

Now, in addition to the Bitcoin network, there’s a second bidder for power capacity in the burgeoning AI market. And this bidder is paying A LOT more than the Bitcoin mining network, essentially de-risking these firms’ business models.

Bitcoin miners have been successful in pivoting to another market, with the larger players taking a lead, but I think we're going to see opportunities trickle down the stack to smaller players who are starting to build custom infrastructure for smaller AI clusters. 

The AI revolution has completely altered the business models of hundreds of bitcoin mining companies in the course of a single year, and for that, it deserves consideration for the year’s biggest story in Bitcoin – even though it has nothing to do with Bitcoin, at least not directly. 

-WSF

Operation Chokepoint 2.0 goes bust - link

Many Americans might recall President Biden’s tenure with a mix of humor and disbelief, as the end of his term was punctuated with questions of his cognitive abilities, questions goaded by numerous examples of Biden’s long history of oratory gaffs and non seuiturs (my personal favorite, “Cornpop was a bad dude,” occurred in 2017).

But Bitcoiners, and especially those working in crypto, will remember him for Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the shadow campaign to debank crypto companies and founders.

It’s hard to overstate how close this operation came to euthanizing America’s crypto industry, the largest in the world. In 2023, it put many startups and established firms on life support as it engineered the failures of Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Bank.

Trump promised to put an end to the directive, and so far, he’s made good on that promise. A U.S. House Financial Services Committee investigation revealed, for the first time in full, how far the operation went, the agencies involved, and the actions they took to sever crypto companies from the world of traditional financial.

The ending of OCP 2.0 — and the investigation that definitely exposed the operation — should go down as one of the defining story of the 2020s for the fledgling crypto industry.

-CMH

The boring truth about the $8B BTC move - link

This July, a long-dormant wallet moved 80,000BTC, about $8.6 billion at the time. Conspiracies swirled – was this asset forfeiture? Satoshi? The US government caught someone?

I wrote what turned out to be a prescient piece on this subject that broke the disappointing news: it was probably an OG Bitcoin whale finally cashing out.

It was actually pretty edgy at the time not to have a conspiracy about this one. I had a lot of folks reach out (normies too) linking various articles about how it could be asset forfeiture due to some suspicious on-chain messages sent to the wallets.

I’ve been around the block a number of times, though, and these mysterious messages matched a common spray-and-pray scam tactic, famously used by Satoshi impersonator Craig Wright.

Later in the summer Galaxy Digital confirmed that they liquidated this BTC on behalf of an OG whale.

This was particularly fun to cover because it hit on a number of topics: OG whales selling, on-chain data, and gut-checking against the rumor mill as someone in the media.

We even did a few podcasts on the topic you should check out (including one with Galaxy Digital!).

-CBS

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Cipher Mining acquires 200 MW Ohio site for AI workloads

Cipher Mining (NASDAQ: CIFR) has acquired a 200-megawatt site in Ohio to support high-performance computing workloads, according to a company press release on Tuesday. The site includes secured capacity from AEP Ohio and all necessary interconnection approvals. Cipher expects to energize the facility in the fourth quarter of 2027 - link

Bitdeer leases Nevada factory for U.S. ASIC miner manufacturing

Bitdeer Technologies Group is establishing a bitcoin mining ASIC manufacturing facility near Reno, Nevada, according to a business update from the developer providing the lease. - link

Georgia regulators approve 10 GW expansion to meet AI data center demand

The Georgia Public Service Commission authorized Georgia Power to procure some 9.9 GW of new generation capacity to serve the rapidly expanding AI data center industry. - link

Strategy raises $747.8 million via stock sales, pauses bitcoin purchases

Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) generated $747.8 million from the sale of common stock without acquiring any bitcoin during the business week of December 15. - link