Author: George Kaloudis, CoinDesk; Translated by: Baishui, Golden Finance
Despite being injured in an assassination attempt on Saturday, former U.S. President Donald Trump is still scheduled to speak in person at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month. This is a huge step forward for cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency now appears in the campaign in an official capacity, no longer just casual talk, but to appease the group of voters that need to be appeased that day. The legitimacy that the industry has been begging for since its inception has finally arrived, and Trump’s presence at a conference on cryptocurrency is its embodiment.
I’m no political strategist, but I always find it odd when presidential candidates spend time campaigning in states they have no risk of losing. There’s no way Trump, or any Republican candidate, is going to lose Tennessee in the 2024 presidential election. Yet, in the middle of an extremely busy campaign season, Trump is in the Volunteer State attending a Bitcoin conference, just as candidates are giving speeches in hangars for the military vote, giving speeches in front of factories in the name of blue collar America, and carrying the Teamsters, getting out the union vote.
Despite polls and data suggesting that most people don’t use or own crypto — 7% of U.S. adults use or hold crypto in 2023 (according to the Federal Reserve), 28% of Republicans hold or have purchased crypto (according to crypto investment firm Paradigm), and 52 million Americans own crypto (according to crypto exchange Coinbase) — it’s still part of Trump’s reelection strategy. The GOP even added crypto to its official platform marketing materials (full, downloadable PDF version) under the “Champion Innovation” sub-point, just above “Artificial Intelligence” and “Expand Space Freedom, Prosperity, and Security.”
Trump’s appearance in Nashville sent a clear message: The content of the meeting is more important than the location. There are enough single-issue crypto voters who can make a difference for Trump.
(At least, that’s enough if you factor in potential donations from crypto tycoons: Trump’s fundraiser at the event cost more than $800,000 per seat.)
The Republican Party has been vying (against… no one except independents or libertarians) to be seen as the pro-crypto party in the U.S. One example was the preemptive anti-CBDC official statements by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis et al (likely to appear anti-China and pro-capitalism). Another example was the House vote to override President Biden’s veto of a pro-crypto resolution that went entirely along party lines (except for one Republican objector and some bipartisan support from 21 Democrats).
It seems to me that cryptocurrencies represent such a personal freedom topic that Republican voters love during this election cycle that Trump has completely abandoned his anti-crypto rhetoric. In 2019, Trump tweeted: "I don't like Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, they are not money, their value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate illegal behavior, including the drug trade and other illegal activity..." Then in 2021, he said in an interview with Fox Business that "Bitcoin is a Scam on the Dollar."
But earlier this year, at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he expressed support for cryptocurrencies, saying “…if you’re for crypto, you better voted for Trump.”
Obviously, Trump needs to win votes, and he wants to win them.
50 million voters, 100,000 ballots: Things are going to get weird
We should get some reality check. Let’s assume there are 50 million crypto holders, as Coinbase claims. Are they all really single-issue voters?
No. Of course not.
Last year, in an interview with CoinDesk’s Marc Hochstein, Ryan Selkis, founder of cryptocurrency research firm Messari and social media provocateur, declared war on Chairman Gary Gensler’s SEC and the anti-crypto hordes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), acknowledging that not all crypto holders will vote for pro-crypto candidates.
But you don’t even need that to win.
“Some states are won or lost by tens of thousands of votes. So you don’t need 50 million people to be single-issue voters. You just need a few hundred thousand in the right districts,” Selkis said.
He’s right. I think the 2024 US presidential election will be decided by about 100,000 votes (not the popular vote of course, I mean the net vote in battleground states), so if a candidate is going to win, he needs to get as many votes as possible in high-risk areas. And since President Biden doesn’t seem interested in handling or courting the crypto vote (a major misstep in my opinion, since showing support for crypto isn’t enough to turn people off if positioned correctly), every single-issue crypto voter is likely to vote for Trump and try to influence those around them to vote for Trump as well.
It makes perfect sense, then, that the Republican Party sees cryptocurrency as a worthy venue to win some key votes.
More importantly, the conference is a huge event and people are traveling to Tennessee to watch it. Trump won’t be speaking to voters in Tennessee, he’ll be speaking to voters from different parts of the US (that is, if you can get Bitcoin holders to vote…).
This makes so much sense. Cryptocurrency is now clearly cemented in the mainstream. And as weird as crypto is, American politics is weird. And it will continue to be weird: it will be weird for Secret Service agents to be scattered around Bitcoin conferences, it will be weird for the mainstream media (and not just their financial or tech reporters) to be in attendance to cover the conferences, and it will be weird when President Trump once again says he wants all remaining Bitcoin to be made in the United States.
I guess when things get weird, weird becomes professional.
