\u201cI want to make a big announcement,\u201d said Faryar Shirzad, the chief policy officer of Coinbase, to a nearly empty room. His words echoed across the massive hall at the Bitcoin Conference, deep in the caverns of The Venetian Expo in Las Vegas, and it wasn\u2019t apparent how many people were watching on the livestream. Then again, somebody out there may have been interested in the panelists he was interviewing, one of whom was unusual by Bitcoin Conference standards: Chris LaCivita, the political consultant who\u2019d co-chaired Donald Trump\u2019s 2024 presidential campaign. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI am super proud to say it on this stage,\u201d Shirzad continued, addressing the dozens of people scattered across 5,000 chairs. \u201cWe have just become a major sponsor of the America250 effort.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
My jaw dropped. Coinbase, the world\u2019s largest crypto exchange, the owner of 12 percent of the world\u2019s Bitcoin supply, and listed on the S&P 500, was paying for Trump to hold a military parade.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No wonder they made the announcement in an empty room. Today was \u201cCode and Country\u201d: an entire day of MAGA-themed panels on the Nakamoto Main Stage, full of Republican legislators, White House officials, and political operatives, all of whom praised Trump as the savior of the crypto world. But Code and Country was part of Industry Day, which was VIP only and closed to General Admission holders \u2014 the people with the $199 tickets, who flocked to the conference seeking wisdom from brilliant technologists and fabulously wealthy crypto moguls, who believed that decentralized currency on a blockchain could not be controlled by government authoritarians. They\u2019d have drowned Shirzad in boos if they saw him give money to Donald Trump\u2019s campaign manager, and they would have stormed the Nakamoto stage if they knew the purpose of America250.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n America250 is a nonprofit established by Congress during Barack Obama\u2019s presidency with a mundane mission: to plan the nationwide festivities for July 4th, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. \u201cWho remembers the Bicentennial in 1976?\u201d the co-chair, former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, asked the crowd. \u201cI remember it like it was yesterday, and this one is going to be bigger and better.\u201d But then Trump got re-elected, appointed LaCivita as co-chair, and suddenly, the party was starting earlier. The week before the conference, America250 announced that it would host a \u201cGrand Military Parade\u201d<\/a> on June 14th to celebrate the U.S. Army\u2019s 250th birthday, releasing tickets for prime seats along the parade route and near the Washington Monument on their website, hosting other festivities on the National Mall, and credentialing the press covering the event. (Their celebrations and events are a different operation from the U.S. Army, which had never planned for a parade to celebrate its 250th birthday, much less a military parade, but is now spending up to $45 million in taxpayer dollars to make the parade happen<\/a>.) According to the most recent statements from Army officials<\/a>, the parade will include hundreds of cannons, dozens of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, and 150 military vehicles, including Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Stryker Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, and if the logistics work out, 25 (or more) M1 Abrams tanks. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Trump had spent years trying to get the government to throw a military parade \u2014 primarily because he\u2019d attended a Bastille Day parade in France and became jealous<\/a> \u2014 and now that he was back in office, he\u2019d finally eliminated everyone in the government who previously told him that the budget didn\u2019t exist for such a parade, that the tank treads would ruin the streets and collapse the bridges, that the optics of tanks, guns and soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue were too authoritarian and fascist. June 14th also happens to be Donald Trump\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And Coinbase, whose CEO once told his employees to stop bringing politics into the workplace<\/a>, was now footing the bill \u2014 if not for this military parade watch party, then for the one inevitably happening next year, when America actually turns 250, or any other festivities between now and then that may or may not fall on Trump\u2019s birthday. (This wasn\u2019t the first party they helped fund, though. Earlier this year, Coinbase wrote a $1 million check to Trump\u2019s inauguration committee. One month later, the SEC announced that it was dropping an investigation into Coinbase.) <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I had to keep reminding myself that I was at the Bitcoin Conference<\/em>. I\u2019d been desperately looking for the goofy, degenerate party vibes that my coworkers who\u2019d covered previous crypto conferences told me about: inflated swans<\/a> with QR codes. Multimillionaires strolling around the Nakamoto Stage in Shiba Inu pajamas. Folks who communicated in memes and acronyms. Celebrity athletes who were actual celebrities. \u201cBitcoin yoga,\u201d<\/a> whatever that was. Afterparties with drugs, lots of drugs, and probably the mind-bending designer kind. And hey, Las Vegas was<\/em> the global capital of goofy, degenerate partying. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But no, I was stuck in a prolonged flashback to every single Republican event I\u2019ve covered over the past ten years \u2013 Trump rallies, conservative conferences, GOP conventions, and MAGA fundraisers, with Lee Greenwood\u2019s \u201cGod Bless the USA\u201d playing on an endless loop. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n There was an emcee endlessly praising Trump, encouraging the audience to clap for Trump, and reminding everyone about how great it was that Trump spoke at the Conference last year, which all sounds even stranger when said in an Australian accent. In addition to LaCivita, there were four GOP Congressmen, four GOP Senators, one Trump-appointed SEC Commissioner, one Treasury Official, two senior White House officials (including David Sacks, the White House crypto and A.I. czar), and two of Trump\u2019s sons. All of them, too, spent time praising Trump as the first \u201ccrypto president.\u201d (Vice President J.D. Vance would be speaking the next day to the general admission crowd, but he was probably going to praise Trump, too.) The titles of the panels seemed to be run through some sort of MAGA generative AI system: The Next Golden Age of America. The American Super Grid. Making America the Global Bitcoin Superpower. The New Declaration of Independence: Bitcoin and the Path Out of the U.S. National Debt Crisis.<\/em> (Speaker: Vivek Ramaswamy.) Uncancelable: Bitcoin, Rumble & Free Speech Technology.<\/em> (Speaker: Donald Trump Jr.) <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The only difference was that this MAGA conference was funded by crypto. And if crypto was paying for a MAGA conference, and they had <\/em>to play \u201cGod Bless the USA,\u201d they were bringing in a string quartet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Annoyed that I had not yet seen a single Shiba Inu \u2014 no, Jim Justice\u2019s celebrity bulldog<\/a> was not the same thing<\/em> \u2014 I left Nakamoto and went back to the press area. It hadn\u2019t turned into Fox News yet, but I could see MAGA\u2019s presence seeping into the world of podcasters and vloggers. A Newsmax reporter (great blowout, jewel-toned sheath dress, heels to the heavens, very camera-ready) was interviewing White House official Bo Hines (clean-cut, former Yale football player and GOP congressional candidate, nice suit), right before he was hustled onstage for a panel with a member of the U.S. Treasury. Soon, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) was doing an interview gauntlet while his senior aides stood by, one wearing a pink plaid blazer that could have easily been Brooks Brothers. Over on the Genesis Stage, the CEO of PragerU, a right-wing media company that attacks higher education, was interviewing the CEO of the 1792 Exchange, a right-wing nonprofit that attacks companies for engaging in \u201cwoke business practices\u201d such as diversity initiatives. (Leveraging Bitcoin\u2019s Values to Shift the Culture in America.<\/em>) <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I walked into the main expo center, past a crypto podcaster in a sequined bomber jacket talking to a Wall Street Journal <\/em>reporter. For some reason, his presence was a relief. Even though he was clearly a Trump supporter \u2014 his jacket said TRUMP: THE GOLDEN AGE on the back \u2014 there was something more janky and homegrown, less corporate, about him. But the moment I looked up and saw a massive sign that said STEAKTOSHI, the unease returned. A ghoulish-looking group of executives from Steak \u2018n Shake, the fast food company with over 450 locations across the globe, had gathered under the sign in a replica of the restaurant. They were selling jars of beef tallow, with a choice of grass-fed or Wagyu, and giving out a MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN hat with every purchase, an overt embrace of the right-wing conspiracy that cooking with regular seed oils would lower one\u2019s testosterone. (Relevant to the conference: they were also advertising that their restaurants now accepted Bitcoin.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Andrew Gordon, the head of Main Street Crypto PAC, had been to five previous Bitcoin Conferences and worked on crypto tax policy since 2014. He\u2019d seen Trump speak at the last conference in Nashville during the election, and the audience \u2013 not typically unquestioning MAGA superfans \u2013 had melted into adoring goo in Trump\u2019s presence. But now that Trump was using his presidential powers to establish a Bitcoin reserve, roll back federal investigations into crypto companies, and order massive changes to financial regulatory policies \u2014 in short, changing the entire market on crypto\u2019s behalf with the stroke of a pen \u2014 Gordon clocked a notable vibe shift this year. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere are people wearing suits at a Bitcoin conference,\u201d he told me wryly back in the press lounge. (He, too, was wearing a suit.) The change wasn\u2019t due to a new breed of Suit People flooding in. It was the Bitcoin veterans, the ones who\u2019d been coming to the conference for years, dressed in loud Versace jackets or old holey t-shirts \u2013 who were now in business attire. \u201cThey\u2019re now recognizing the level of formality and how serious it is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n According to the Bitcoin Conference organizers<\/a>, out of the 35,000-plus attendees in Vegas this year, 17.1 percent of them were categorized as \u201cinstitutional and corporate decision-makers\u201d \u2014 a vague way to describe politicians, corporate executives, and the rest of the C-suite world. Whenever they weren\u2019t speaking onstage, they were conducting interviews with outlets hand-selected from dozens of media requests that had been filtered through the conference organizers, or in Q&A sessions with people who\u2019d bought the $21,000 Whale Pass and could access the VIP Lounge. (Yes, the industry-only day of the conference had an even more exclusive tier.) They were sidebarring with crypto CEOs outside the conference for round tables, privately meeting Senators for lunch, and White House officials for dinner. Gordon himself had just held a private breakfast for industry insiders, with GOP Senators Marsha Blackburn and Cynthia Lummis as special guests. And for the very, very<\/em> wealthy, MAGA Inc., Trump\u2019s primary super PAC, was holding a fundraising dinner in Vegas that night, with Vance, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in attendance. That ticket, according to The Washington Post<\/em>, cost $1 million per person<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was the kind of amoral, backroom behavior that would have sent the General Admission attendees into a rage \u2014 and they did the next day, when the convention opened to them. During one extremely packed talk at the Genesis Stage called Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State?, <\/em>a moderator asked the four panelists what they\u2019d like to say to Vance and Sacks and all the politicians who\u2019d been there yesterday. And Erik Cason erupted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201c\u2018What you\u2019re doing is actually immoral and bad. You hurt people. You actively want to use the state to implement violence against others.\u2019 \u2029That\u2019s like, fucked up and wrong,\u201d said Cason, the author of \u201cCryptosovereignty,\u201d to a crowd of hundreds. \u201cIf you personally wanna like, go to Yemen and try to stab those people, that\u2019s on you. But asking other people to go do that \u2013 it is a fucked up and terrible thing.\u201d He grew more heated. \u201cAnd also fuck you. You\u2019re not, like, a king. You\u2019re supposed to be liable to the law, too. \u2029And I don\u2019t appreciate you trying to think that that you just get to advance the state however the fuck you want, because you have power.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThese are the violent thugs who killed hundreds of millions of people over the last century,\u201d agreed Bruce Fenton of Chainstone Labs. \u201cThey have nothing on us. All we wanna do is run some code and trade it around our nerd money. Leave us alone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The audience burst into cheers and applause. Bitcoin was the promise of freedom from the government, who\u2019d murdered and stolen and tried to control their lives, and now that their wealth was on the blockchain, no one could take their sovereignty. \u201cPersonally, I don\u2019t really care what they [the politicians] think,\u201d said American HODL, whose title on the conference site was \u201cguy with 6.15 bitcoin,\u201d the derision clear in his voice. \u201cThey are employees who work for us, so their thoughts and opinions on the matter are irrelevant. Do what the fuck we tell you to do.\u2029 I don\u2019t work for you. I\u2019m not underneath you. You\u2019re underneath me.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the politicians weren\u2019t going to listen to them, much less talk to them. The politicians spent the conference surrounded by aides and security who stopped people from approaching \u2013 I\u2019m sorry, the Senator has to leave for an engagement now \u2013 <\/em>or safely inside the VIP rooms with the $21,000-dollar Whale Pass holders and the million-dollar donors. By the time American HODL said that the politicians worked for him, they were on flights out of Vegas, having gotten what they wanted from Code and Country, an event that was closed to General Admission pass holders.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Coinbase\u2019s executives were<\/em> at Code and Country, however. Coinbase held over 984,000 Bitcoin, more coins than American HODL could mine in a lifetime. And Coinbase was now a sponsor of Donald Trump\u2019s birthday military parade. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n After David Sacks and the Winklevoss twins finished explaining how Trump had saved the crypto industry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or as one Winklevoss called her, \u201cPocahontas\u201d<\/a>), I was jonesing for a drink. A few other reporters on the ground had told me about \u201cCode, Country and Cocktails,\u201d the America250 afterparty held at the Ayu Dayclub at Resort World, and I signed up immediately. Reporters at past Bitcoin Conferences had promised legendary side-event depravity, and I hoped I would find it there. As I entered the lush, tropical nightclub, I saw two white-gloved hands sticking out of the side of the wall, each holding a glass of champagne at crotch level. I reached out for a flute, thinking it was maybe<\/em> just a fucked-up piece of art, and gasped as the hand let go of the stem, disappeared into the hole, and emerged seconds later with another full champagne glass. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Past the champagne glory hole wall \u2014 there was really no other way to describe it \u2014 was a massive outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by chefs serving up endless portions of steak frites, unguarded magnums of Mo\u00ebt casually stacked in ice buckets, the professional Beautiful Women of Las Vegas draped around Peter Schiff, the famous economist\/podcaster\/Bitcoin skeptic. When not booked for private events, the crescent-shaped pool at Ayu would be filled with drunk people in swimsuits, dancing to DJ Kaskade. No one was in the pool tonight. Depravity was not happening here. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In fact, there was more networking going on than partying, and it was somehow more engaging than Bone Thugs-N-Harmony suddenly appearing onstage to perform. And it was distinctly not <\/em>just about making money in crypto. A good percentage of this crowd wore some derivative of a MAGA hat, and anyone who could show off their photos of themselves with Trump did so. This, I realized, was how crypto bros did politics \u2014 a new game for them, where success and influence were not necessarily quantifiable. \u201cCrypto got Trump elected,\u201d Greg Grseziak, an agent who manages crypto influencers, told me, showing me his Trump photo opp. \u201cIn four years, this is going to be the biggest event in the presidential race.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Grzesiak walked off to do more networking, I finished my glory hole champagne, and in the meantime, Bone Thugs had started performing \u201cEast 1999\u201d. A fellow reporter leaned over. \u201cWho do you think those guys are?\u201d he asked, pointing to a group of extremely tall white men in suits and lanyards, standing behind a velvet rope to the left of the stage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I walked over to investigate. They looked like the group of Steak \u2018n Shake executives I met at the Expo Hall \u2014 the ones with the beef tallow jars and derivative MAGA hats \u2014 and they were lurking next to the stage, watching the rappers like vultures but barely moving to the music. This scene was too preposterous to actually be real: Steak \u2018n Shake executives, at the Bitcoin Conference, attending a party for America250, in the VIP section, during a Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShout out to Steak \u2018n Shake for being the first fast food restaurant to accept Bitcoin!\u201d announced one of the Bones. The company logo appeared on a screen above his head.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n No flashy Vegas magic (or dancers in cow costumes, now shimmying onstage with Steak \u2018n Shake signs) could mask what I just saw. This party was co-sponsored by a MAGA-branded fast-food chain owned by Sardar Biglari, a businessman who had purchased Maxim<\/em>, became its editor-in-chief, and used the smutty magazine to endorse Trump in 2024. So was Frax, the stablecoin exchange, and Exodus, one of the biggest crypto wallet companies in the market. Bitcoin Magazine\u2019s logo flashed across the stage at one point, as editor-in-chief David Bailey, in his own derivative MAGA hat, tried to hype up the crowd for J.D. Vance\u2019s speech the next day. (\u201cYou only get to live history once,\u201d he said, to faint cheers.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For some unknown reason, these companies were all putting their money into America250, and as I had to keep reminding myself, America250 \u2014 the government nonprofit in charge of planning the country\u2019s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration\u2019s signing \u2014 was currently working to get tanks in the streets of Washington DC for Donald Trump\u2019s birthday. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I went for one last champagne flute from the glory hole, just for the novelty, and as the hand disappeared back into the wall, I caught something I\u2019d missed earlier: above the hole was a logo for TRON, the blockchain exchange run by billionaire Justin Sun. He had faced several fraud investigations from the SEC that magically disappeared after he invested $75 million in a Trump family crypto company, and seemed more than happy to keep throwing crypto money at Trump. Recently, he won the $TRUMP meme coin dinner, spending over $16 million on the token in exchange for a private and controversial dinner with the president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n TRON was also cosponsoring the America250 party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Earlier, I\u2019d run into the Australian emcee in the elevator of The Palazzo. She\u2019d spent the day teetering across the Nakamoto Stage in dainty kitten heels, a pinstriped blazer and miniskirt suit set, and given the gratuitous Trump praising and the fact she was blonde, I had stereotyped her as MAGA to the core. But the program was over and she was holding her heels by their ankle straps, barefoot and sighing in relief. This was not her usual style, she told an attendee. She\u2019d take a pair of sneakers over heels if she could. But the conference organizers had told her to dress up because there were senators in attendance. \u201cTomorrow, the real Bitcoiners are coming,\u201d she said, and she\u2019d get to wear flat shoes. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n And the next morning, on the day of Vance\u2019s speech, I found myself stuck outside the conference with the \u201creal Bitcoiners.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In spite of all the emails that the conference had sent me reminding me of how strict security measures would be, possibly to overcorrect from last year\u2019s utter shitshow around Trump\u2019s appearance, I\u2019d woken up too late, eaten my bagel too leisurely, got sidetracked by a police officer-turned-Bitcoin investor excited I was wearing orange (whoops), and barely missed the cutoff for the Secret Service to let me in. But the conference had set up televisions with a live feed of Vance\u2019s speech, and the rest of the general admission attendees were remarkably chill about it, opting to mingle in the hallways until the Secret Service left. I found myself in a smaller crowd near the expo hall door, next to a young man carrying a live miniature Shiba Inu (\u201cIt\u2019s a tiny doge!\u201d he said proudly), and the podcaster I\u2019d seen earlier in the sequined bomber jacket. He introduced himself as Action CEO, and with nothing else to do but wait \u2014 \u201cYou can watch the [Vance] replay,\u201d he reassured me, \u201cthese events are mainly about networking\u201d \u2014 we got to talking. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m actually excited that Trump isn\u2019t even here, I\u2019ll be honest with you,\u201d he said, speaking with a rapid cadence. Trump was ultimately just one guy, and the fact that he sent his underlings and political allies \u2014 the ones who could actually implement his grand promises for the crypto industry \u2014 proved he hadn\u2019t just been paying lip service. That said, it had come with some uncomfortable changes, including the re-emergence of Justin Sun. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit concerning when you say, All right, we don\u2019t care what you did in the past. Come on out, clean slate,\u201d <\/em>he continued. \u201cThat\u2019s the concern right now for most people. Seeing people that did wrong by the space coming back and acting like nothing happened? That\u2019s a little concerning.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n And not just that: Sun was back in the United States, having dinner with Trump, and giving him millions of dollars. \u201cIf you\u2019re sitting in a room and having a conversation, people are literally gonna go, yeah, it\u2019s kind of sketch that this guy is back here after everything that\u2019s happened.<\/em> You\u2019re not gonna see it published, because it\u2019s not a popular opinion, but we\u2019re all definitely talking about it.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n If Action\u2019s friends weren\u2019t comfortable talking about it openly, that fraudsters with enough money were suddenly back in the mix, it was certainly not the kind of conversation the CEOs were going to have in front of the General Admission crowd. (Though it did mean that the emcee, looking much happier than she did the day before, got to wear low-heeled boots and shorts.) But behind closed doors \u2014 or at least at the Code and Country panels, where the base pass attendees couldn\u2019t boo them \u2014 they gave a sense of what their backroom conversations with the Trump administration did <\/em>look like.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI was actually at a dinner last night and one of the things that someone from the admin said was, What if we give you guys everything you want and then you guys forget? <\/em>Because there\u2019s midterms in 2026, and hopefully 2028, and beyond,\u201d said Sam Kazemian, the founder and CEO of Frax, which had sponsored the America250 party. \u201cBut one of the things I said was: We as an industry are very, very loyal. The crypto community has a very, very, very strong memory. And once this industry is legalized, is transparent, is safe, all of the big players understand that this wasn\u2019t possible without this administration, this Congress, this Senate. We\u2019re lifelong, career-long allies.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cLoyalty\u201d is a dangerous concept with this president, who\u2019s cheated on his three wives, stopped paying the legal fees for employees who\u2019d taken the fall for him<\/a>, ended the careers of sympathetic MAGA Republicans for insufficiently coddling him, withdrew security for government employees experiencing death threats for the sin of contradicting him in public<\/a> by citing facts. It was only weeks ago that he and Vance were publicly screaming at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was at the White House to request more aid in the war against Russia, for not saying \u201cthank you\u201d in front of the cameras. It would be less than a week before he began threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk\u2019s government contracts<\/a> when the billionaire criticized the size of Trump\u2019s budget, even though Musk had given him millions and helped him purge the government<\/a>. And if you were to find a photo of any political leader, billionaire, or CEO standing vacant-eyed next to Trump and shaking his hand, the circumstances are practically a given: they had recently made him unhappy, either for criticizing him, making an imagined slight, or simply asserting themselves. The only way they could avoid public humiliation, or their businesses being crushed via executive order, was to go to Mar-a-Lago, tell the world that the president was wonderful, and underwrite a giant party for his birthday military parade. Maybe Kazemian knew he was being tested, or maybe the 32-year-old Ron Paul superfan had no idea what the administration was asking of him. Either way, he responded correctly. At least one person at the conference was thinking about ways that the government could betray the Bitcoin community. As the panel on Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state wrapped up, and the other panelists finished telling the government pigs to go fuck themselves and keep their hands off their nerd money, the moderator turned to Casey Rodarmor, a software engineer-turned-crypto influencer, for the last question: \u201cTell everyone here why Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOh, man, I don\u2019t know <\/em>if Bitcoin wins, regardless of what happens,\u201d he responded, frowning. He had already gamed out one feasible situation where Bitcoin lost: \u201cIf we all of a sudden saw a very rapid inflation in a lot of fiat currencies, and there was a plausible scapegoat in Bitcoin all over the world, and they were able to make a sort of marketing claim that Bitcoin is causing this \u2014 Bitcoin is making your savings go to zero, it\u2019s causing this carnage to the economy<\/em> \u2014 \u2029If that happens worldwide, I think that\u2019s really scary.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The moderator froze, the crowd murmured nervously, and I thought about the number of times Trump had blamed a group of people for problems they\u2019d never caused. An awful lot of them were now being deported.<\/a> \u201cI take that seriously,\u201d Rodarmor continued. \u201cI don\u2019t know <\/em>that Bitcoin will succeed. I think that Bitcoin is incredibly strong, it\u2019s incredibly difficult to fuck up. But in that case\u2026 man, I don\u2019t know.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I had asked Action CEO earlier if Kazemian, the Frax CEO, was right \u2014 if the crypto world was unquestioningly loyal to Trump, if their support of him was unconditional. \u201cOh, it\u2019s definitely conditional,\u201d he said without hesitation, as his Trump jacket glittered under the fluorescent lights. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of, are you going to be doing the right things by us, by the people who are here?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n We walked down the expo hall, past booths promising life-changing technological marvels, alongside thousands of people flooding into Nakamoto Hall, ready to learn how to become unfathomably rich, who paid $199 to be there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/06\/btc-steak-n-shake-hat.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C5.5555555555556%2C100%2C88.888888888889&w=2400\"\/)
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