Former president Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday, July 27, 2024.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, July 27, 2024.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. —“If you don’t elect me,” Donald Trump told thousands of Bitcoiners at the annual Bitcoin conference on July 27, “I hate to tell you, you’re going to be crushed.”
The ex-president and newly minted crypto supporter spoke at the national Bitcoin conference for nearly an hour to a rapt audience, toggling between stroking attendees’ egos (“high-IQ individuals!”) and his own (“because of me, [regulators] are leaving you alone. So please say, ‘Thank you, President Trump, thank you very much.’”) He hit his talking points (Bitcoin is a “miracle of humanity” that should not be stifled with regulation, and rampant inflation is a “stealth taxation” that is destroying the nation), and made election-year promises to unleash crypto’s profitability to even greater heights.
Five years ago, while Trump was in the White House, he had declared himself “not a fan” of Bitcoin and crypto, tweeting that they “are not money,” with their value “highly volatile and based on thin air.” But in the past few months, he has gotten cozy with the crypto industry, a process a Bloomberg report suggests was kicked off by Trump’s enchantment with his own NFT series—digital assets featuring flattering, iconized pictures of himself. But whatever precipitated the relationship, Trump has undoubtedly benefited from the industry’s ample spending money. The new pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake has thus far raised more than $200 million, which it has mostly spent on negative ads against Democrats. Trump reportedly amassed a full $21 million at the Bitcoin conference itself, mostly through a “roundtable” meeting whose entry fee was $844,600 a pop with another $60,000 for a photo with the former president.
With Trump delivering a keynote to the conference, it seemed that Bitcoin had completed a journey from the economic fringes into the middle of political life. Another presidential hopeful, Robert Kennedy Jr., was also a headliner, and 10 senators were in attendance. “All of us were told we were crazy for years,” T.J. Miller, the conference MC of Saturday’s events yelled, as he paced across the stage. “And now, fuck those guys!”
Yet walking around at the Bitcoin conference gave a distinct picture of a crypto movement sitting awkwardly at a crossroads. The movement, on principle, rejects governments and banks but is also giddy at the arrival of politicians and BlackRock representatives. It fawns over well-heeled businessmen (as long as they’re pro-Bitcoin!) but is also brimming with libertarian nerds who arrived at the conference wearing as much orange (the color of Bitcoin’s logo) as they could find: from orange loafers up to their orange cowboy hats. One man wore a puffy physical representation of a Bitcoin on his torso, along with knee-high Elvis socks and a giant red hat that read “HAT GUY.” Another—a crypto influencer who excitedly told me, “They call me Loudmouth!”—was decked out in gold chains and rings, and had pictures of his own face, tongue out, embroidered onto his red-and-gold-sequined suit and sailor hat.
Hard to miss were the many men wearing “Vote Trump. Free Ross Day One” T-shirts, thousands of which were given away at the conference. Ross Ulbricht, now 40 years old, is serving a life sentence for founding Silk Road in 2011, a Bitcoin-fueled black market where people traded crypto for drugs, some pornography, and occasionally—as Ulbricht himself did—assassination attempts. The majority male and overwhelmingly white and middle-aged participants wore many hats: cowboy hats, baseball caps—many MAGA caps among them but many more that read “Make Bitcoin Great Again.” At least a couple of men sported crumpled suits and Donald Trump wigs.
At booths packed into the conference’s Expo Hall one could buy packs of Bitcoin trading cards that teach kids “the fundamentals of sound money” or glow-in-the-dark “Essence of Bitcoin” art made by Jack and Susan, a couple who use 12,000 volts of electricity to burn what Susan explained were “lightening channels” in the shape of the Bitcoin logo and sparks into wooden wall art.
You could even purchase citizenship to Liberland, “the world’s freest country.” Colin, who showed me his own Liberland passport, explained that while he doesn’t live there himself, the territory was settled by about 30 people living in a house at the center of the island. The aspiring nation is being built on disputed territory between Serbia and Croatia. Liberland’s passports, Colin clarified, are “still not recognized,” so he uses his Canadian one
