You said part of that gets paid to the mods, but I thought I also heard that they get paid very little and also that it depends on how much moderating they do. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on either of those points. But jeez, with 125BTC the forum could afford to pay for a ton of moderators even if it paid well.
And how much does it cost to upgrade the forum, anyway? With bitcoin at $55k or so, you'd think 125BTC would more than cover it (but I won't complain about that either, since I'm kind of a fan of the way the forum is now).
125 BTC is more than enough to sustain the forum for generations to come. Even after Elon has launched his new space programs to cover Uranus and Pluto.
Not to mention that the weekly ad revenue from advertisers and the Copper membership can cover pretty much most of the hosting and domain expenditure, assuming that SMF renewal is not factored in as we've been stuck since 2019.
Sadly we won't know how much the mods get paid since that's part of the NDA. But as one myself, it's way less than a typical clerical job.