People line up to take their picture next to a cardboard cutout of former President Donald Trump; fist in the air, blood on his face post assassination attempt. Above them a second copy of the cutout rotates atop a tower of bitcoin mining equipment. Superimposed over his clenched hand is a big bitcoin.
Trump is the headliner of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, arguably the most high-profile speaker for the conference since El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele appeared via video in 2021 to announce that he’d make cryptocurrency legal tender in his country.
If you’re not a member of the bitcoin community, you’d be forgiven for thinking the conference is full of Trump supporters. The halls pop red with bright baseball caps, but look closer: Most of them say “Make Bitcoin Great Again,” not “America.” The MBGA hat, one wearer tells me, is “not a political statement … it’s just for fun.”
The presidential candidate claims to be the first “major party nominee to accept donations in bitcoin and crypto.” As of July 25, he’s received more than $4 million worth. Nearly two million came from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, twin founders of crypto trading platform Gemini, who Trump calls out during his Bitcoin 2024 speech, saying they “look like male models…with a big, beautiful brain.” Another big chunk came from CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, Jesse Powell, who wrote that he donated $1 million to Trump—“mostly” in Ether. Trump is courting the industry, and they’re courting him back.
This is not a Trump rally, the conference organizers at BTC Media emphasized to me. If it’s any kind of rally, it’s a bitcoin one, I’m assured. After his speech, Trump held a $844,600 per seat donor dinner in Nashville, hosted by Bitcoin conference organizer David Bailey. But conference organizers say President Joe Biden was invited to speak at the conference, and then Vice President Kamala Harris when he dropped out of the race and endorsed her. “Would be very savvy of her to reset the democrat positioning on the fastest growing voter block in the country,” Bailey posted to X on July 23.
Harris didn’t attend. Instead Trump, and Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. represent. Of the 10 politicians on the conference’s speaker list, only two were Democrats.
Based on what attendees—most of whom are men—say their voting plans are for 2024, this lineup makes sense. One attendee describes the Democratic party to me as dangerously approaching “communism.” Others express distrust over the left-leaning media, asking whether I think Trump’s shooting was staged (a conspiracy theory that’s crossed party lines), and who directs what I write.
Free speech looms large in the belief system of a trio who appear the most visibly in support of Trump. Wearing matching red shirts with Trump’s fist pump photo, American flag knee socks, and MAGA (not MBGA) hats, the trio, whose X handles are @CryptoPatriot, @CryptoViking, and @MAGAPaulie, tell me their mission of “flipping” voters to Trump is all but moot at the bitcoin conference.
“We get nothing but support now,” says Viking, the largest of the group. Patriot describes their experience in the front row of the Pennsylvania rally where Trump was shot on July 13. “It was a terrifying moment. We were concerned for our fellow patriots. And for Donald J. Trump. Soon as we saw him raise his hand up with the infamous ‘fight, fight, fight,’ it rejuvenated the crowd.”
At the conference there are also single-issue voters, the most singular of which entails freeing Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted for life for his involvement with online dark market Silk Road in 2015.
Trump has vowed to pardon Ulbricht on “day one” of his presidency. Conference attendees wearing black T-shirts that read, “Free Ross. Vote Trump” pepper the floor. At the booth giving out the shirts, normally manned by Ulbricht’s mom Lyn, volunteer Omer Manna hands a “Free Ross” t-shirt to a long-haired man wearing a baseball shirt labeled “Bitcoin Jesus.”
To stick with the religious symbology, Manna calls freeing Ross the bitcoin world’s “holy grail”—and the reason why he’s voting for Trump. “If Ross isn't free,” he says, “nobody's free.” It’s not about Trump. The president could be a “ham sandwich … he’s got to free Ross.”
Ohio-based former realtor Dan McCarthy, 43, also calls himself a single-issue voter—for bitcoin. Though he didn’t vote for Trump in the past two elections, and would prefer to vote Kennedy in this one, it’s clear to him now that a vote for Trump means a vote for bitcoin.
He cites our country’s “monetary problems”—bitcoin can “fix” them, he says. McCarthy says it matters more than foreign policy, which was one reason why he didn’t vote for the “strong arming” Republican candidate previously.
Not everyone at the conference is particularly political, and McCarthy’s not the only one who plans to vote for Trump for the first time in 2024.
“I didn't vote for Trump, either in 2016 or 2020. He might get my vote this year—not because of bitcoin, but that doesn’t hurt,” says Wilbur Robey, who runs a Columbus, Ohio bitcoin meetup. “I just felt like, anyone but Biden, I hate to say it.” Now that Harris is taking Biden’s place, Robey says he is going to think on it.
“Bitcoin, I don't think it's political. At least I don't see it as a political thing,” he adds. Regardless, he believes that Trump’s presence at the conference this year “has got to be a good thing” for the digital coin.
Kennedy’s keynote on Friday still draws a crowd. He gets big cheers for saying he’ll make bitcoin transactions nontaxable, but the moments he criticizes Trump provoke clearly unintended silences. No one wants to boo the bitcoin president, even though Kennedy’s consistency in the industry and grasp of the ideology could make him a more stalwart candidate to promote the industry.
Like Trump, Kennedy, known for his environmentalism and inaccurately asserting the dangers of mercury in vaccines, vows to transfer the US government’s more than 210,000 seized bitcoin to the Treasury, “where it will be held as a strategic asset.” He also says he’ll sign an executive order “directing the US Treasury to purchase 550 bitcoins daily,” until the US has built a reserve of “at least 4 million,” or nearly 20 percent of the total supply.
It’s a much more ambitious goal than the 5 percent senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, with Trump’s support, proposes the next day. Even bitcoin conference goers fear it will drive the price of bitcoin to inaccessibility for new buyers, potentially freezing out the middle-class Kennedy claims to want to boost economically.
“There're 60 million bitcoiners, and probably most of them vote,” Kennedy tells WIRED after his talk. “I don't think they're likely to vote for the Democrat…But I also think Bitcoin is antithetical to [the Democrats’] whole operating philosophy.”
Is Trump, who’s flipped from calling bitcoin a “scam” to being “good” with crypto, sincere in his enthusiasm? “I always take people at their word,” Kennedy says. “I'm happy that President Trump has embraced it…The more he learns…hopefully some of his previous announcements will evolve.”
Skeptics, like host of the Vegan Posse podcast Chrissy Benson, disagree. She points out Trump had four years to pardon Ulbricht and whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden during his last term. He didn’t. She’s “leaning toward” voting for Kennedy. “The fact that I would even remotely consider voting for Trump is like, what has the world come to?” she says.
On the snaking line to enter the room of Trump’s keynote, I’m sandwiched between two very different future Trump voters. Rick Potocki, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based older man who works at the ETF and mutual fund manager VanEck, and Eric Ramirez, a Long Island, New York native wearing shorts he bought for the Fourth of July and a Trump post-assassination attempt shirt that he had screen-printed for $15. Potocki voted for Trump in 2020 and will do so again “given the alternatives,” and the candidate’s border policies. For Ramirez, this year will be the first time.
Though “not embarrassed” by his new shirt, Ramirez had expected to see more attendees wearing similar ones. He says donning it for the keynote was a kind of dress-up—he thought he’d fit in. Instead, he talks about how he stands out. “I'm a minority, and there's not a lot of minorities that speak about bitcoin,” he says. “I started doing my own research about Trump and how he’ll be for the economy. I changed my tune, the same way Trump did about bitcoin.”
Trump’s speech is an hour behind. A half hour into the wait, restless attendees start chanting “Trump.” The woman sitting in front of me murmurs her own chant:
“Bitcoin, bitcoin—that’s what they should be chanting.” She must have gotten the memo: It’s not a Trump rally; it’s a bitcoin rally.
When Trump finally takes the stage to “God Bless the USA,” he basks in the glory of his standing ovation, “thrilled…to become the first American president ever to address a bitcoin event.” His next step is to pander to his supporters in the audience. “This is the kind of spirit that will help us make America great again. I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration,” for what he later calls all the “high IQ individuals” in the room. He reiterates past promises (freeing Ross on day one, never creating a Central Bank Digital Currency) and tacks on some new ones (the plan for a US strategic bitcoin reserve, which senator Lummis details in a brief speech after Trump’s; the firing of SEC chairman Gary Gensler, a crypto industry nemesis). He promises no one in the industry will have to move to China for jobs and says we’ll continue to use fossil fuels. We’ll have so much electricity, he says, “you’ll say please, please Mr. President … no more electricity, sir, we have enough!”
He disses his political opponents, as per usual, and promises no one in his administration will “go woke,” a sentiment he maybe knows will resonate with the bitcoin crowd. But he shows an even better understanding with a basic appeal to audience’s wallets: Under his leadership, “bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before.” The crowd goes wild.
Exiting the conference center after the speech, I spot a dollop of side-swept orange hair disappearing down the escalator. I follow him.
“It was a very orange talk,” the Trump impersonator, Atlanta-based comedian Josh Warren says when I ask how the keynote went, immediately pretending to be Trump. “We’ve been asking people who’s more orange, RFK or me, and it’s coming astoundingly that I’m still the orange man.”
Warren’s not a bitcoin guy, but his shtick got a better reception here than at the Libertarian National convention in DC. When I ask about his vote, he says it’ll be “for comedy.”
“We’re just here to disrupt the status quo. Humanity is killing comedy,” he says, seriously, before jumping back into the Trump act to add how the “deep state doesn’t want you talking about things that make you think anymore.”
In his introduction to Trump’s keynote, Bailey had called bitcoin “not a red party thing. It’s not a blue party thing. It’s an orange party thing [referencing the color of the bitcoin logo].” Before he joked that an orange party should be run by an orange man, he had a point. Bitcoin 2024 ticketholders aren’t necessarily people who would define themselves as Trump enthusiasts, though the majority that spoke to WIRED seemingly plan to vote for him. Moreso, they’re people who have traditionally distrusted the government, an opinion that more mainstream swathes of society now share.
“I was born conservative, went to liberalism. Now, going back to conservativism, mainly because of what I've seen in our country recently,” says Andrew Campbell, who drove in from Texas and sports a bitcoin pin along with his naturally bitcoin-orange hair. “I think we've gone too far left, and we need to snap back a little and recenter.”
