News
Trump, who once criticized bitcoin as “based on nothing,” addresses largest cryptocurrency convention
CNN Nashville —
For a while, Donald Trump would have been an unlikely speaker at a cryptocurrency conference.
As president, Trump declared that bitcoin “is not money” and criticized it as “highly volatile and based on nothing.” He warned that cryptocurrencies have helped facilitate illegal underground markets.
“We have only one true currency in the United States, and it is stronger than ever,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It’s called the United States Dollar!”
But on Saturday, Trump has spoken the cryptocurrency industry’s largest annual gathering here in Nashville not as a cynic but as one of its most notable proponents – the culmination of a total reversal of trend on the issue during the former president’s last run for the White House.
Despite cryptocurrency’s recent troubling history and his own past reservations, Trump has fully embraced the hype and hopes of the nascent industry. His campaign is now accepting donations in bitcoin and has raised about $4 million, a source familiar with his fundraising said. He has slammed the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate the industry as a “war on cryptocurrency” without acknowledging the massive fraud schemes that have destroyed public trust in digital currencies. And he has vowed, as president, to make it easier for cryptocurrency mining companies to operate in the United States.
“Otherwise, the same thing will happen to other countries,” Trump said earlier this month in Wisconsin.
The industry, in turn, has embraced Trump. Its leaders and investors have donated millions of dollars to his campaign and lined up political committees. They are vocal about his candidacy with their sizable online audiences and gave him a platform Saturday to speak directly to an expected 20,000 attendees at this year’s Bitcoin Conference.
“A lot of these people see themselves as single-issue voters,” said technology writer Jacob Silverman, author of the best-selling book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.” “If Trump or anyone else says they’re pro-bitcoin, that matters to them.”
Trump made several crypto-friendly policy pledges on Saturday, including promising to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler and create a “national strategic bitcoin reserve,” all part of his campaign promise to encourage growth in the sector in the United States.
“If cryptocurrencies are going to define the future, I want them to be mined, minted and produced in the United States,” Trump said at the convention, before a more traditional campaign event in St. Cloud, Minnesota, later in the day.
Since Trump expressed his opposition to bitcoin in 2019, the volatile sector has only faced more turbulence, most notably the arrest, trial and detention of Sam Bankman-Friedthe founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Once the face of a company that counted comedian Larry David and superstar quarterback Tom Brady among its endorsements, Bankman-Fried was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme through his companies.
The Trump campaign declined to say what triggered the former president’s 180-degree turn on Bitcoin. Nor did Trump address one of the central criticisms of digital currencies: the lack of practical, real-world use for them, as well as the fact that they are a highly speculative investment.
Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes said in a statement to CNN that “cryptocurrency innovators and others in the tech industry are under attack” from Democrats, while the former president was “ready to encourage American leadership in this and other emerging technologies.”
Republican allies have joined Trump in his move toward Bitcoin. Speaking at the conference on Friday, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott argued that the former president understands attendees’ concerns about financial freedom, a common refrain in the cryptocurrency community.
“We want people, whether they love their dollars or their digital assets, to be responsible for their decisions,” Scott said.
Industry leaders have been courting Trump for months, briefing his campaign on their political agenda and the opportunity to influence voters on the issue, David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin-focused media company BTC Inc., said in a recent interview.
Their pitch, Bailey acknowledged, included “the amount of industry support it can get” by embracing cryptocurrency. Their conversations included a meeting earlier this summer with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“Everything accelerated rapidly at that point,” said Bailey, whose company hosts the annual conference where Trump spoke on Saturday.
Indeed, support for Trump has come quickly. Billionaire cryptocurrency moguls Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have pledged to donate $1 million in bitcoin to Trump’s campaign. The Federal Election Commission has allowed political committees to receive bitcoin contributions since 2014, with the value of the bitcoin determined by its price at the time the contribution is received.
Cryptocurrency was also a topic of discussion during a recent fundraising blitz through Silicon Valley that Trump’s new running mate, the Ohio senator Mr. J.D. Vancehelped organize. Billionaire tech entrepreneur David Sacks, a prominent cryptocurrency advocate, hosted one of the fundraisers at his home.
“One of the things I think we heard a lot at that dinner was just the difficulty that people in the business world were having with this Biden administration,” Sacks said on a recent episode of the “All-In Podcast,” which he co-hosts. “You have the crypto guys who just want a framework. They just want the government to tell them how to operate, and they can’t get that.”
Industry leaders and supporters have become increasingly politicized, helping to fund super PACs that have overwhelmingly supported Republicans over Democrats.
“It’s time for the cryptocurrency army to send a message to Washington,” Tyler Winklevoss wrote in a long social media send supporting Trump. “That attacking us is political suicide.”
Eric Soufer, a policy adviser to major cryptocurrency firms, said cryptocurrency insiders who were pushed out of power after the Bankman-Fried episode were “looking for political validation after years in the wilderness.”
“They feel like this is their moment, and it’s hard to resist someone telling them everything they want to hear,” Soufer said.
The cryptocurrency sector has experienced a renaissance since FTX Fall. After a 2022 crash, the price of bitcoin recovered and hit an all-time high in June. The excitement for this year’s Nashville event was palpable inside the Music City Center. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also spoke at the conference on Friday.
However, many Americans have expressed concern about cryptocurrency, even as more people become aware of it. A Pew Research Survey 2023 found that about 9 in 10 adults had heard of cryptocurrencies, and 75% of those people did not believe they were safe or reliable.
But Trump’s courtship of cryptocurrency voters is in line with other efforts to find new support in unconventional places. Earlier this year, Trump reached out to members of the Libertarian Party at their annual convention, where he promised to “support the right to self-custody for the nation’s 50 million cryptocurrency holders.” There’s considerable overlap between libertarians and the cryptocurrency community.
It wasn’t hard to find Trump supporters at the Bitcoin Conference. John Fischer, a 61-year-old from Atlanta, has been personally investing in cryptocurrency since 2021. He voted for Trump in 2020 and plans to do so again.
Nonetheless, he was prescient about Trump’s attempts to woo conference attendees.
“Every politician will be for something if they want to get votes,” Fischer said.
Luke Broyles, a 25-year-old from Michigan who works in the cryptocurrency industry, was equally unsure about Trump’s latest demands, despite his recent rhetoric.
“I think there’s a fair amount of skepticism among people who use Bitcoin,” Broyles said. “I think that’s reasonable. Ultimately, people use Bitcoin because they don’t trust politicians.”
This story and headline have been updated as further developments occur.