Forty-Eight Hours at the MAGA-fied Crypto Lovefest
By Zeke Faux, Bloomberg
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
On July 17, about a week before Donald Trump took the stage in front of 8,000 Bitcoin fans in Nashville, Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey gleefully explained how he and his friends had gotten the presidential candidate to attend the convention. Bailey, a 33-year-old with a baby face and a thick beard, appeared on a podcast called Galaxy Brains and told the host that the event was so crazy that he was keeping a journal to record everything that happened. "I'm not going to publish this because no one is going to believe it's true," Bailey said.
Why is Bailey so excited? It’s easy to understand why. Trump will attend a conference hosted by Bailey’s company, a convention for Bitcoin’s true believers who firmly believe that Bitcoin is the only true cryptocurrency and the future world currency. Just a few years ago, the conference was as marginal as a clown party, when Trump publicly called Bitcoin a “scam”; now, he will take the stage to endorse Bitcoin.
Bailey said he had spent almost all of four months trying to get Trump to attend the meeting. Although the former president has been a critic of cryptocurrency, he worked with the co-author of the 2007 book "Think Big and Kick Ass" to create a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called "Trump Digital Trading Cards." These NFTs are essentially cartoon images of Trump's muscled superheroes, hunters, soldiers, etc. that sell for $99, and Trump held an event for NFT buyers at his Mar-a-Lago club in May. There, he became more open to cryptocurrency. Bailey immediately took action to arrange meetings with industry insiders and the campaign team.
“The campaign is like bullshit artists trying to sell shit,” Bailey said. “If you want to make progress (Bitcoin recognition and support), you have to show them the money.”
Donald Trump speaks at Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville
Bailey told the podcast host that he was speaking metaphorically about the process of building enthusiasm. But he did, planning a fundraiser for Trump in which the top ticket required a donation of $844,600 to Trump and the campaign committee, the maximum amount allowed by campaign finance laws. Only ten people gave that much. “It’s a lot of money,” Bailey said, “but not nearly enough to sway a party’s views. “I was shocked to see how much influence a very small number of people could have over time.” (In a later interview, Bailey downplayed his role in persuading Trump, saying that many people around Trump were already interested in Bitcoin and that the candidate’s support was not due to donations from the industry. “The campaign’s funding follows the policy,” Bailey said.)
In the podcast, Bailey described Trump's appearance as a step in a larger plan. Bailey speculated that if Trump is elected, he might announce plans to build a strategic reserve of Bitcoin, just as the United States reserves gold in Fort Knox. This plan would certainly drive up the price of cryptocurrencies, and other countries might also start buying them, hoping to get ahead of the United States. If Trump tells China that Bitcoin is vital to the United States, China might reverse its cryptocurrency ban and buy Bitcoin. "If we want China to buy Bitcoin, all we have to do is get someone to say we're stopping them from buying Bitcoin," Bailey said, adding that the price of a single Bitcoin could reach $1 million.
“As the faith has spread, so has our financial power,” Bailey said. “You can’t beat that.”
For those familiar with Bitcoin’s disruptive origins, it may seem paradoxical that Bitcoin’s backers have lobbied past and future U.S. presidents to adopt it as an anonymous, untraceable digital cash. But in the 15 years since it was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous person or group, Bitcoin has failed to gain widespread acceptance as a currency.
Bitcoin enthusiasts now call it a "store of value." They call it "digital gold" and talk about how only 21 million bitcoins will ever be issued, unlike the money that central banks print at will. To skeptics, their main concern seems to be the rise in the price of bitcoin, which sometimes sounds more like describing a pyramid scheme. From this perspective, Trump represents the ultimate goal of Bitcoin, who can bring the US government to the bottom of the pyramid, trigger a global race to buy Bitcoin, and make those at the top of the pyramid extremely wealthy.
Since Bailey’s 2021 conference, I’ve heard stories about past Bitcoin conferences. I laughed at the “El Salvador first, then the world” logic when I saw the crypto brothers crying when the president of El Salvador announced Bitcoin as the country’s legal tender. Later, I went to El Salvador and found that the plan failed. I wrote a book about it (Number Go Up) and found that the plan was completely stupid and full of fraud. It seems that the probability of Bitcoin holders selling their assets to the Federal Reserve is as high as the probability of me taking my children’s artwork out of the refrigerator and selling it to the National Gallery.
Fast forward to the present, crypto prices have recovered, and Bitcoin’s most ardent supporter has been endorsed by a man who could very well be the next president. I’ll have to see for myself if he fully supports crypto.
“Donald Trump is our vehicle for putting Bitcoin game theory to work,” Bailey said. “It will pay unimaginable dividends over the next four years.”
When I walked into the Bitcoin conference at Nashville’s Music City Center on Friday morning, I found it to be much like any other I’ve attended, save for the red capital letters that emblazoned “Make America Great Again” or “Make Bitcoin Great Again.” More typical was the ubiquitous orange “B” symbol. Aficionados hawked Bitcoin children’s books, Bitcoin quilts, and embarrassing Bitcoin artwork featuring more orange “Bs” and burned, mashed, or shredded government currency. (Trump, never one to miss an opportunity to promote a product, later peddled orange Bitcoin sneakers on Truth Social.) A bikini-clad model sprayed herself with water heated by a Bitcoin mining machine. I saw Hailey Welch, of “hawk tuah” fame, lingering at a booth selling orange lingerie.
Attendees at the conference dressed in MAGA apparel
The event was less a technical hackathon and more a marketing conference, aimed at mobilizing salespeople to sell products to their friends and family when they go home. The concept of the event is the "orange pill," which is a metaphor for when a person's mind is liberated and he begins to accept Bitcoin, just like Keanu Reeves' Neo accepts reality in "The Matrix." "Our whole office took the orange pill," said a woman from Jersey City, who was wearing an orange work uniform embroidered with the words "Bitcoin Orthodontist."
On stage, discussion of cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin was discouraged, and among attendees, I didn’t hear any discussion of the many crypto scams, such as Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. The only Ponzi scheme for this group of people was the Federal Reserve, which they claimed was printing unsustainable money and would cause the dollar to collapse. Many of the people I spoke to hosted Bitcoin meetups in their hometowns, or had Bitcoin podcasts or Bitcoin-related small businesses. One woman handed me an advertising card for a Bitcoin-related science fiction novel and told me she was “one of the author’s wives,” and I ended up having an hour-long discussion with the owner of an appliance store about whether Bitcoin adoption would lead to the company making more durable refrigerators and dishwashers.
Many pundits attribute Trump’s erratic behavior on Bitcoin to his pursuit of a large group of so-called “crypto voters.” They often cite a survey released last year by Coinbase Global Inc. that found that 20% of American adults own cryptocurrency. “There are tens of millions of voters in the United States who are invested in cryptocurrency,” Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., told me at the conference.
Even if that’s true (a Federal Reserve survey in May found that only 7% of adults own crypto), it seems to me unlikely that financial deregulation will be a top political issue for most people. So what about those who got scammed? Comedian Nikki Glaser may have captured mainstream attention during her Netflix roast of Tom Brady, when she poked fun at the former NFL quarterback for losing money in crypto and mentioned his notoriously goofy teammate Rob Gronkowski. “Even Gronk said, ‘I know that’s not real money,’ ” she said.
At the conference, cryptocurrency swing voters proved elusive. Most attendees told me they supported Trump or independent candidate Robert Kennedy, who was more vocal in his support for Bitcoin. “I’m still undecided,” said a truck driver from Cincinnati who asked me to call him Colonel Kernel Stacker. (Kennedy said he wasn’t angry that Trump had upstaged her at the conference.)
Get discounts on clothes and scarves with Bitcoin
Crypto swing voters are at the top of the crypto industry, which leaned Democratic when FTX’s Bankman-Fried was the industry’s most prominent political player. Fairshake, a political action committee backed by crypto companies, has raised more than $200 million, more than any other super PAC in this election, and has said it will support crypto-friendly politicians on both sides of the aisle. Most of Fairshake’s financial support, though, comes from companies that have been sued by the SEC or venture capitalists who have invested in sued companies. That makes them natural adversaries for the Biden administration (SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has taken an aggressive stance on crypto) and kindred spirits with Trump, who has complained for years that fraud lawsuits against his businesses are not legitimate. In a podcast last month, Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has donated $44 million to Fairshake, argued that the Biden administration’s attack on crypto “subverts the rule of law.” Horowitz has said he will vote for Trump and reportedly plans to donate a large sum to his campaign. (Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.)
On Friday afternoon, one of Bitcoin’s most influential advocates, Michael Saylor, the 59-year-old chairman of the software company MicroStrategy Inc., took the stage. He has plowed billions of MicroStrategy’s money into Bitcoin since 2020, with huge returns. (Saylor and MicroStrategy also agreed to pay $40 million in June to settle a tax-fraud lawsuit, without admitting wrongdoing.) Several attendees told me that they learned about Bitcoin through Saylor’s speeches, which have been viewed millions of times online.
Some in the crowd had lined up just to hear Saylor, and he didn’t disappoint. Wearing a dark suit and a red tie that was nearly as long as Trump’s, he used a slideshow to explain why countries should buy Bitcoin. And rightfully so, since he predicted that the price of a single Bitcoin would rise 190-fold to $13 million by 2045.
“You’re going to be very rich,” he said.
Nashville Bitcoin 2024 conference booth
On Friday evening, a few hours after Saylor spoke, I went to a hotel near the convention center, where Donald Trump Jr. and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson were scheduled to attend a side event sponsored by $MAGA, a cryptocurrency dedicated to the “Make America Great Again” movement, one of many memecoins hoping to join the movement.
The two men emerged from a large black SUV along with Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, another former Fox News host. Carlson had invited Saylor onto his Fox show in 2021 to talk about Bitcoin. When I asked him if he had ever given Donald Trump the orange pill, he nearly screamed with laughter. “I hope so,” he said. When I asked Trump Jr. if he supported the memecoin MAGA, he told me he was just visiting a friend.
Bailey arrived soon after. Trump’s change of heart was “not his fault at all,” he told me, and headed straight to the event. I had previously requested media accreditation, but an organizer denied me, citing a line from my book: “From the beginning, I thought cryptocurrency was stupid. It turned out to be even stupider than I thought.” Fortunately, the event was live. As Trump Jr. and Carlson spoke, members of a Telegram chatroom dedicated to discussing tokens exchanged insults and shared memes from the 2004 satirical film Team America: World Police. “I love this community,” Trump Jr. said. “You’re all pioneers.”
Trapoot Wizards Balloons Debut at Bitcoin 2024 Conference in Nashville
I went to another rooftop party, this one hosted by the team behind Taproot Wizards, a series of scribbled-looking wizard NFTs. There, amid a circle of men in wizard hats talking about Bitcoin, I spotted someone who surprised me: Heather Morgan, better known as Razzlekhan, the bad rapper who calls herself “Wall Street Alligator” and helped her husband launder the proceeds of a $4.5 billion Bitcoin hack, the largest theft ever.
Morgan later pleaded guilty, and her bail conditions apparently allowed her to attend the Bitcoin party. She wore a black dress with a leather collar and fishnet stockings and chatted with Lil Pump, a famous rapper who launched his own token in June. One of them, wearing a wizard hat, tried to incite them to a rap battle.
Ironically, if Trump follows Bailey’s advice and builds up a Bitcoin reserve, Morgan would be equally responsible: most of the Bitcoin held by the U.S. government was confiscated from her and her husband.When I introduced myself, Morgan pulled off her black hat and walked away quickly.
Another man who claimed to be a wizard pulled me into the conversation. “David Bailey has been working hard for all of us,” he said.
Pizza Ninja presents at Bitcoin 2024
The next day, I arrived three hours before Trump's speech. Organizers said the auditorium could hold 8,000 people, but there were not many seats left, but I managed to get a seat near the back.
“Someone big just landed,” said host TJ Miller, a curly-haired comedian who quit “Silicon Valley” amid allegations of erratic behavior, which he denied.
Fundraisers were also being held elsewhere in the building. One of my deskmates, whose company had developed a MAGA-themed token, said her colleagues had paid $100,000 to get their pictures taken with Trump.
Guards escorted a man wearing a gold, full-face mask past me. Some said he was a billionaire who had invested in a cryptocurrency called Shiba Inu, a Dogecoin knockoff.
As we waited, retired U.S. Representative Ron Paul appeared via video link at the convention center. “This bubble will burst,” he said. It was hard to hear him over the chatter in the crowd, but I was pretty sure he was talking about the dollar.
When it was time for Trump’s speech, he didn’t show up. Rumor has it that he was waiting for Elon Musk to arrive. To keep the crowd entertained, organizers played an ad for a new documentary called God Bless Bitcoin. Available for free on YouTube, the title seemed to be a literal description.
Trump emerged from backstage about an hour late, with Elon Musk still nowhere to be seen. He sang a sentimental country ballad that has become his anthem, “God Bless America.” After mentioning the recent Hezbollah attack on Israel, he began talking about how Bailey had brought him to the meeting. Trump clearly respected Bailey’s salesmanship.
“I took a picture, it was published, Donald Trump and David Bailey, and your industry skyrocketed,” Trump said, raising a hand over his shoulder. “So David, congratulations, you’re doing great in whatever you do.”
He then thanked the many powerful celebrities in attendance. MicroStrategy’s Saylor, fund manager and Bitcoin evangelist Cathie Wood and Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick were praised, the latter of whom earlier in the day had delivered an angry speech defending Tether Holdings Ltd., the issuer of the controversial Tether stablecoin and a client of his bank. Trump praised YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, who, I later discovered, paid the Securities and Exchange Commission about $100,000 last year to settle charges that he touted crypto tokens without disclosing that he was being paid. (He neither admitted nor denied the charges.)
Trump also praised Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin brothers whose cryptocurrency exchange agreed in June to pay $50 million to settle a fraud lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general. (The cryptocurrency exchange neither admitted nor denied the allegations.) “They are male models with beautiful brains,” he said. Trump praised everyone in the room, calling them “highly intelligent people” and saying they “have the spirit of our forefathers.”
I think that’s all the Bitcoin supporters are going to get. While Trump did talk about “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas” etc., he repeated some of the same sentiments I’ve heard from Bitcoin supporters and cryptocurrency lobbyists. In addition to the Coinbase survey claims, he also said he’d heard from consultant Vivek Ramaswamy (a former presidential candidate who also presented at the survey) that 175 million people are involved in cryptocurrency, a massive voting bloc.
Trump said: "If Bitcoin is going to the moon, I want the United States to be the country leading the way."
Then he started talking about how he didn’t want China to beat the U.S. in cryptocurrency, seemingly unaware that China had tried to ban cryptocurrency. I was surprised. This is exactly what Bailey said on the Galaxy Brains podcast a week ago. “We can’t let China dominate,” Trump said.
When Trump announced that Gensler was being fired, the applause was so thunderous that he paused and said the phrase again.
He said he would write regulations to allow the expansion of stablecoins, which he said “extend the dollar’s dominance to new areas around the world,” echoing Cantor Fitzgerald’s Lutnick.
Trump said the banks’ refusal to work with cryptocurrency companies was unfair, calling it “Operation Chokepoint 2.0.” The cryptic phrase was coined by a cryptocurrency venture capitalist, who later tweeted: “If you post something on the internet enough, it can eventually be cited by presidents past and future.”
Finally, Trump did call for the government to invest in Bitcoin. "For too long, our government has violated the cardinal rule that every Bitcoin holder knows by heart: Never sell your Bitcoin." He added that the United States already holds 210,000 Bitcoins confiscated by law enforcement, and he would order the government to keep them rather than auction them off for cash. "This will actually be the core of the national strategic Bitcoin reserve."
He ended with an apparent improvisation: “Have fun, everybody, whether it’s Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, or whatever.”
As I walked out of the auditorium, the crowd seemed a little disappointed, even though Trump recited nearly every verse of the Bitcoin anthem. Robert Kennedy, who proposed a much larger U.S. Bitcoin reserve in his speech, seemed to have set expectations too high. One cryptocurrency developer told me that he had been hoping Trump would announce a plan to buy $800 billion worth of Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency podcaster told another cryptocurrency podcaster in the auditorium that he still preferred Robert Kennedy.
Trump’s fundraiser had already hit its goal. Bailey wrote on X that the fundraiser had raised $25 million. A few days later, Trump spoke on Fox Business about how he might use Bitcoin to pay down the national debt. “Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion debt and give them a little crypto check, right?” he said with a laugh. “We’ll give them a little bit of Bitcoin and then our $35 trillion debt will be paid off.”
