Pump and Trump

Inside the MAGA-fueled fever dream of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference.

There were rumors that Elon Musk would introduce former President Donald Trump before his keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Musk had pledged to donate tens of millions to a Trump super PAC; he was close with JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee; he was into crypto and memes. People tracked Musk’s jet and noticed it was reducing altitude over Tennessee. It was happening. It would be historic.

The Bitcoin Conference is an annual affair, and each year, it’s bigger and flashier than the one before. The last few were in Miami, Florida; this time, the conference was moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take place only a week after the Republican National Convention. My seatmate on the flight down told me he never misses a conference. He and his friends call it “Bitcoin prom,” a weekend that is just as much about partying as it is about networking. But things were different this year: scheduled to speak at the conference were more than a half-dozen Republican politicians, prostrating themselves before the crypto gods, chasing money and support from a community that once defined itself by its resistance to the government. And then there was Trump, the centerpiece of it all, hoping to welcome the techno-libertarians and the finance bros into his ever-expanding coalition.

The Bitcoiners were ready for Trump, and Trump was ready for their votes. But this marriage of cryptocurrency and the Republican political machine was off to a rocky start as the conference struggled to handle the logistics of hosting the former president and his retinue.

It was, frankly, a shitshow.

On the day that Trump was set to speak, I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga. I was also told that Bitcoin Yoga had happened yesterday (it had; I was too tired from a late night of Bitcoin Topgolf to make it to yoga on time) and was not on the schedule for today (it was, in a timeslot an hour and five minutes before a session on “Self-Governance: Bitcoin and Beef”).

As the staffers behind the help desk tried to get to the bottom of whether Bitcoin Yoga was actually on the schedule (it was), whether Bitcoin Yoga was happening (it wasn’t), and whether the Secret Service was responsible for its cancellation or there had just been some sort of miscommunication (a Secret Service spokesperson later told me the agency “did not request any cancellation of any conference events”), a Bitcoin Magazine writer inquired about his backpack, which he’d left in the “whale VIP room” overnight and which had since disappeared. He was told the Secret Service probably took it during their security sweep; maybe he could check the lost and found?

At the press desk, a crypto beat reporter was indignant to learn he wouldn’t be getting a “green pass,” the mysterious, higher-tier credential that conference organizers were giving to select reporters that allowed them to skip to the front of the Secret Service line. A different crypto beat reporter I’d met at a party had also been snubbed; he was a “small fry,” he told me. I had originally been denied one of these passes as well, a problem that could only be resolved after a frenzy of phone calls and emails from multiple editors. The press desk staffers told me the distribution of the passes had been decided by the Secret Service and said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list. A Secret Service spokesperson later told me that the “issuance of media credentials and the selective distribution of media credentials” didn’t “fall under our purview,” claiming those responsibilities were handled by the conference staff. As far as I could tell, the publications that were getting the press pass fell into two buckets: big names like The New York Times and right-wing media. It felt these outlets were being prioritized over the trade publications that had been covering Bitcoin for years. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore?

This was the final day of the conference, and everyone was on edge waiting for Trump’s scheduled speech that afternoon. Every crypto cause célèbre and fever dream was a possibility. Maybe he’d announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bulwark against inflation. Maybe he’d promise to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose name had been uttered hundreds of times over the weekend, never without contempt. Maybe he’d promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht — the operator of the Silk Road, a covert marketplace that ran largely on Bitcoin — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Maybe he’d reveal himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, reclusive creator of Bitcoin, who in these circles was regarded as a prophet or maybe a god. Maybe, probably, none of that would happen — but the man was here, with us, and that was all that mattered.

A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight. Around 8AM, eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line to get into the Music City Center spilled out the door and around the block. Everyone around me was wearing red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats or red $MAGAA memecoin hats or red BITCOIN MADE IN AMERICA hats or orange MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN hats, the latter of which, I’d learn, were being given out for free by a crypto retirement platform called Bitcoin IRA. There were shirts that said DONALD PUMP, shirts that showed Trump in the aftermath of being shot, his fist in the air, that said FIGHT! FIGHT!, and shirts that said FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP that, like the orange hats, had been given away for free.

The guards at the door said no bags or outside food or drinks were allowed. A quartet of well-coiffed women demanded to be let in with their handbags, security rules be damned — they had Secret Service clearance, they said. They were told to find someone inside with the campaign or the conference who could vouch for them. “This is not a regular day,” one of the guards barked at another woman who asked if she could bring in a sandwich. Banal contraband piled up outside the glass building like offerings before a temple: tote bags, half-full water bottles and coffee cups, the remnants of breakfast.

This was only the first step. Getting to the main stage required passing through a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and walking past a stage upon which a rotating cast of local musicians performed for an audience that mostly ignored them. From there, you would join the very back of a line that snaked through the expo floor. After a 45-minute wait and a second security screening — this one conducted by the Secret Service and the TSA — you’d be in the room where it happens, the Nakamoto stage. Leaving for any reason short of going to the bathroom, because thankfully there were bathrooms, meant doing it all over again: the line and the pat-down, the waiting, the anticipation.

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The lines had been even longer on Friday, before the implementation of the no-bag rule. Unlike other events with Secret Service protection that I’d covered in the past, the Bitcoin Conference had no dedicated media entrance. There was a makeshift press room downstairs stocked with free coffee, tea, and water, but there was no expedited entry for journalists who wanted to see the show on the main stage. Vivian Cheng, the media liaison, escorted me to the front of the Secret Service line on Friday and told me not to count on her help again; after this, I was on my own. As we walked past the hundreds of people who had waited — were still waiting — for hours to get in, I asked if the rumors about the no-bag policy on Saturday were true. She wasn’t sure. And laptops? Also unsure.

Trapped amid what meager audience had made it past the screenings thus far, I attempted to make the best of the situation by listening in on panels I had planned on skipping. The tenor of the conversations was more politicized than the event descriptions had led me to believe. A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government attack” on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. “President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive.”

And what about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris? (She had been invited to the conference but declined to attend.) “Harris hasn’t commented, but her political perspectives have historically been more to the progressive side than President Biden,” said Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (no known relation to the Peter). What do Bitcoiners want? “We don’t need anything,” Les said. “We just need an active campaign to not fight against us.”

This attitude tracked. The previous night, at a Bitcoin Topgolf party hosted by podcaster Crypto Megan and actor / alleged sex criminal T.J. Miller, a group of crypto attorneys complained to me about SEC regulations. The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants to go after you. The oldest among them said the fact that Trump — someone who “legitimized white nationalism” — had embraced cryptocurrency wasn’t an entirely positive development. But we weren’t here to talk politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing.

Yet politics seemed to be all anyone could talk about inside the convention center. “Under a Trump administration, we’re going to see Bitcoin mining flourish,” Thiel said. “Under a Harris administration, we have no idea what the energy policies are going to be.” To ensure its ongoing success, the Bitcoin community needs to have “the right pro-Bitcoin politicians in office, no matter the side of the aisle,” Les said. One side of the aisle had sent its presidential nominee and several sitting members of Congress to court Bitcoiners. The sole representative for the Democratic Party was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had come to make the “progressive case for Bitcoin.” And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., representing both and neither.

Exhausted and hungry, I abandoned my post at the Nakamoto stage after realizing I could no longer sit in the cold, dim room without any caffeine or calories to sustain me. At a nearby coffee shop, I sipped on a cold brew and eavesdropped on a job interview; everyone involved had conference wristbands around their arms. One interviewer asked the interviewee his SAT score, and the group commiserated about the now-scrapped writing section, which was too subjective to be of any real use in college admissions. Back at the convention center, the line to get into the main stage area was the longest I had seen it yet, wrapping all the way around the expo floor. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to try flashing my press credentials to the security guards working the door and asking if they’d let me skip the line, figuring the worst they could do was say no. (A spokesperson for the Secret Service later told me the decision to allow certain press pass holders to skip the line was not made by the agency.) I interrupted the guys behind me, who were having an impassioned conversation about the perils of DEI in the workplace, and asked them to hold my spot in case I came back.

I got in without issue, somewhere near the middle of Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s diatribe about the power of holding your coin. Saylor spoke with messianic fervor: the people in this room would get rich, would stay rich, while everyone who failed to get on board would be left behind. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin and the liberatory power of cryptocurrency. (Lummis, who unveiled a draft bill that would require the Treasury secretary to establish a network of Bitcoin storage facilities across the country, was supposed to be joined by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was taken off the program at the last minute.) “Free at last, free at last,” Scott proclaimed, seemingly evoking Martin Luther King Jr.

Edward Snowden took a more sober tone. He appeared virtually and was greeted with a standing ovation, before revealing that because of the technical setup, he could neither see nor hear the audience. (The crowd’s enthusiasm immediately deflated.)

“I spoke recently at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and the things we talked about were very different. The last time, the topic was about how the game is rigged but we can’t leave,” Snowden said. The amount of political representation at this year’s conference, he said, was a “wonderful, remarkable thing,” but it was also cause for concern. “Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult,” he told the audience. “They are not our tribe, our personality — they have their own interests, their own values, their own things they’re chasing.”

Snowden received far less applause when the speech ended, possibly because the crowd didn’t appreciate him killing the vibe, possibly because the audience knew he couldn’t hear them. Then it was time for RFK Jr. — introduced as “the next president of the United States” — who told the Bitcoiners that they have it all right.

“Bitcoin is the currency of hope,” he declared to roaring applause. “It is the perfect currency. It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure specie.” If you fix the money, he said, you fix the world.

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That night, I found myself at a party for Joe Allen, a tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room who had just published a book on transhumanism and the war against humanity. “What I see there,” he said of the Bitcoin Conference, “is an opportunity on the one hand, but it’s also a very dark temptation.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the globalists toward whom Bannon and others on the nationalist right usually direct their ire, he said.

“These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me later. However, he took a remarkably pragmatic view on the perverse and Satanic. “In the long term, I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.”

But not many at the convention center shared Allen’s sentiment; few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians, the cattle ranchers who just want the Department of Agriculture out of their business, and the crypto bros who want the SEC out of their wallets. The movement, it turns out, is big enough for all of them: their disagreements on certain subjects are less salient than their disdain for the regulatory state — their desire to liberate themselves from the authorities who want to tell them what to do and how to live, who want to take their money and give it to people who didn’t work for it. The bureaucrats want to implement central banking digital currencies, to track what we buy and who we buy it from, to cut dissidents off from the economy. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to get rich; Bitcoin is a way to break free.

“Bitcoin is about decentralization, freedom, and getting to the source,” Grant, a 31-year-old from Arizona told me ahead of Trump’s speech. Neither side, he said, is going to stop printing money; the right is “pandering to voters” by taking a pro-Bitcoin stance, but it’s better than what the Democrats are doing. Like many of the other conference attendees, he proudly displayed his ideology on his shirt, which read STOP SUBSIDIZING VEGANS. The shirt, he explained, was merch from his company, CrowdHealth, a health insurance crowdfunding platform that describes itself as helping people “break free from corporate run sick care.” As we spoke, a woman approached us and asked how exactly we were subsidizing her vegan lifestyle. Then they, too, found common ground: both are RFK Jr. supporters and plan on voting for him in the presidential election.

But most people I spoke to were not at the conference for the fringe player. They were there to see Trump, to hope the Republican presidential candidate would openly declare his allegiance to cryptocurrency. An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, I got an email inviting me to watch the speech at the DNA House, a pop-up event space hosted by an asset management fund. “Skip the lines and yes you can bring a bag and have a drink,” the email read. Between the suffocating crowds, the harsh austerity of the Nakamoto stage, and the ominous alleged Secret Service seizures of other reporters’ backpacks, the invite was extremely tempting. I left.

The convention center was full of politicians and grifters and hangers-on, as were the surrounding events. The weekend kicked off with Bitcoin Karate, which I skipped because it sounded annoying, only to learn that both RFK Jr. and the “Hawk Tuah” girl had been in attendance. By the time I got there, the expo floor had booths for Bitcoin coffee grown in El Salvador and a booth where an artist painted Pepe portraits of attendees. People working a booth operated by The Daily Wire, the conservative news website, handed out SCAMALA signs to people waiting in line to see Trump. Upon entering the main stage area, attendees were greeted by a man handing out signs that said BITCOIN 2024 on one side and IN SATOSHI WE TRUST on the other. Everyone was selling or promoting something. Milling around the conference floor, I saw Madison Cawthorn, the erstwhile Gen Z member of Congress outside the main stage, and interviewed no fewer than six people involved with different MAGA-adjacent altcoins.

DNA House carried a promise of something different. I’d gone to a party there the night before after a brief interlude at a meetup for $EGIRL, a Musk-adjacent reactionary memecoin, at which I was one of approximately four women in attendance (not including a group of girls waiting to ride a mechanical bull). At DNA House, I was surprised to encounter a more or less “normie” crowd of crypto bros and finance types. The first man I met that night rattled off a list of his accomplishments: founder, chairman, cofounder, and so on. On the stairs outside, I smoked a cigarette with a compliance auditor who told me and a crypto beat reporter about his project to, if I understood him correctly, mine Bitcoin using hydrogen cells. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There were very few women there, as was the case everywhere I went.

In the light of day, DNA House was more intimate, though the crowd was no less male. One man told me this was where the “whales” were; another invited me to a private afterparty at “Taylor Swift’s recording studio.” There was a catered lunch — grilled salmon, broccoli, a rice pilaf situation — and an open bar, one screen set to the livestream of the conference, another displaying the live price of both Bitcoin and the $MAGAA memecoin. The people at DNA House may have been less overtly MAGA than those at the convention center, but only marginally so. I overheard a bearded man tell someone he works with Young Americans for Liberty. Before Trump’s speech, someone told me he and several others had attended a $3,000-a-person event at the Westin Hotel rooftop the night before hosted by the $MAGAA coin developers at which Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. both spoke.

Trump was late, as he always was, and everyone assumed there had to be a good reason, maybe a special guest like Elon Musk. When he finally took the stage, around an hour after he was scheduled, Musk was nowhere to be found, and most of the people around me were too absorbed in conversation to notice that the stream had stopped working. We caught the highlights: in between his usual stump speech about the border and wokeness, Trump pledged to fire Gary Gensler and then repeated himself when he realized the audience had worked itself into a frenzy. It “sent the crowd into ecstasy,” a reporter friend who stayed behind at the convention center texted me. The same was true for the spectators at DNA House, though they were far less interested in the rest of Trump’s policies and couldn’t even spare a little applause for his promise to stop taxing tipped wages. (The audience at the convention center was much more impressed.)

Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He got close, danced right up to the line, and said that under his presidency, the US would never, ever sell its Bitcoin holdings. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. “He’s going to announce it,” Scott Walker, a cofounder of DNA Fund said from a small stage. The price of Bitcoin shot up briefly, for a split second, then went back down. And then it was over.

Trump moved on. He promised to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence and the audience at the conference roared again. There was a smattering of applause from the crowd at DNA House, too, but the mood in the room had shifted. People had put their phones away.

“Have a good time with your Bitcoin, and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” Trump told an enthusiastic convention center audience. “We’re going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth.”

The DNA House set was pleased but not thrilled; they were trying to manage their expectations. Sure, Trump hadn’t given them what they wanted, but he had come close. He wasn’t fighting them. He was still their guy.

“Trump went out there, he kind of promised, or kind of came up with a minimum of a promise, but he did not follow through,” Walker said after Trump’s speech. After a weekend of anticipation, the pomp and grandeur of the conference, all the waiting and every interminable line, the Bitcoin diehards and tryhards had been let down.

“I expect the market will react neutral at best,” Walker said.

Trump had a much better night than the Bitcoiners who were hoping to see their assets appreciate, rather than (briefly) decline. That night, while the DNA Fund hosted another party, Trump raked in a reported $21 million at a fundraiser where seats sold for as much as $800,000 a person. The biggest players were staying the course. The market would adjust. And maybe the Democrats would, too.

After the conference, I talked to Kyle Lawrence, a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, a crypto law firm based in New York City, whom I had met on the flight to Nashville. He’d watched Trump’s speech from an overflow room at the convention center, surrounded by people in MAGA hats, and told me that he hoped that rather than turning Bitcoin into a partisan issue, Trump’s speech would show Democrats the power of the crypto constituency. “It basically opened the door for Kamala Harris to change her party’s tune on cryptocurrency,” he said.

Someone I spoke to at the DNA party the night of Trump’s speech put it more bluntly: if Harris promises to fire Gary Gensler, or if Biden does it now, the Democrats can claw back some support from the Bitcoiners.

The morning after, almost everyone I saw at the Nashville airport had a hat or tote bag or shirt or wristband identifying them as a Bitcoin Conference attendee. Here we were, together, returning to reality, and everything still felt surreal. As I made my way to my gate, I walked past a man wearing a FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP shirt who looked curiously like Martin Shkreli. It was the pharma bro himself, seemingly delighted to have been recognized. When I identified myself as a reporter and asked if he wanted to talk about the conference, he laughed and walked away.

At the gate, a couple, both of whom were crypto content creators, asked what I thought of the conference. “The crowd was electric,” one of them said of the reaction to Trump’s speech. But, the other said, Trump didn’t fully deliver. Her fiancé disagreed; this was huge. Behind us, a man told his friend he skipped the entire conference on Saturday because he knew it’d be “such a shitshow” with Trump.

The friend told him he’d missed out. “It was historic.”