Donald Trump and a Big Break: Cryptography and the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Walker, Ten Tension, Seattle, July 22 – December 13, 2016
“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. The conference had been let down by all of the waiting and long lines, which had come after a weekend of anticipation.
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 the first of its kind.
Both Trump and the Bitcoiners were ready for the election. The conference struggled to handle the logistical aspects of welcoming the former president and his retinue, as the marriage of cryptocurrencies and the GOP was off to a rocky start.
Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He said that under his presidency the US would never sell its holdings of Bitcoins. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. Scott Walker, a founding member of DNA Fund, said that he was about to announce it. The price went back down after the brief rise, after only a second. And then it was over.
Trump got on with it. 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 stopped using their phones.
There was a promise of something different in DNA House. There I went to a party the night before with approximately four women and a group of girls who were waiting in line to ride a mechanical bull. I was surprised to see a large crowd of people who are involved with finance and/or the finance industry. The man I met that night had a list of his accomplishments. The compliance auditor told me and the reporter about his project and then I smoked a cigarette on the stairs. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There was very little women there, along with the other places I went.
“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 was rigged and we could not leave. He said the amount of political representation at the conference was a wonderful thing, but it was also cause for concern. He urged the audience to vote, but not join a cult. They are not our family, they have their own interests, values, and things to chase.
“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.”
The Bitcoin community goes MAGA. Where did Martin Luther King Jr. eat his first birthday? What happened to the next president? A conversation with Cynthia Lummis
The crowd might not have appreciated him killing the vibe if they had known he could not hear them. RFK Jr., who was called the next president of the United States, told the people that they have it all right.
I got in without issue, where Michael Saylor was speaking about holding your coin and how it can change the world. People in this room would get rich, but they wouldn’t stay rich, and everyone who didn’t get on board would be left behind. Cynthia Lummis talked with Tim Scott about their love ofCryptocurrencies and the liberatory power of country. (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.
The first step is only the beginning. It took a lot of effort to get to the main stage, starting with a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and ending with a stage that was mostly ignored by the audience. There was a line that snaked through the expo floor. After 45 minutes of waiting, you would be in the room where the second security screening was conducted, 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.
Source: The Bitcoin community goes MAGA
The Security Rule Problem at a Crypto Topgolf Party: What Do Cryptophiles Really Want? A Journalist’s Inquiry
This attitude was 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 coin law was that there were no laws, so the government made up rules 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. We were not here to discuss politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing.
What about the vice president of the democrats? She was invited to the conference but did not 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.”
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.
A reporter working for a technology company was upset to learn that he wouldn’t get a green pass, the special type of accreditation that allows them to skip 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 said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list because the passes had been decided by the Secret Service. 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. The New York Times and the right-wing media were both included in the bucket of publications that got the press pass. It felt that these outlets were being prioritized over trade publications that had been covering Digital Currency. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore?
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 he could check the lost and found if he went to the Secret Service.
I was told on the day that Trump was scheduled to speak by the Secret Service. I was too tired from a late night of topgolf to make it to yoga on time, which is why I didn’t have a scheduled yoga class today.
One of the proposals Trump floated is a bitcoin reserve where the US would stash and HODL billions of dollars’ worth of tokens, a scheme that experts consider of dubious value to taxpayers—but might jack up the value of the currency to the enrichment of the Nashville crowd. There’s no way the values of the blockchain revolution will be impacted by government manipulation. Silk Road owner Ross Ulbricht was promised a pardon by Trump and currently serving a life sentence in a federal prison. So much has changed since being tough on crime.
Legitimate question: Does the current White House “hate crypto,” as the industry and Trump seem to believe? In the early days of the administration, when it was a relatively low priority during the swine flu epidemic, it was up for grabs, though some officials viewed it as a scammy technology. The administration tried to walk a line between encouraging innovation in the field and ensuring that current securities law is enforced.
