At Bitcoin 2025, Crypto Purists and the MAGA Faithful Collide
“The Secret Service is a little bit nervous because I told them, ‘These bitcoin guys really like guns,’” US vice president JD Vance tells the audience at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on May 28. “‘But they really like the president and vice president of the United States, too.’”
The cheers that ignite the room leave no reason to doubt Vance’s statement. Why wouldn’t they like him? He’s the first US vice president to own bitcoin (worth between $250,000 and $500,000 per an August 2024 disclosure).
And though the excitement was more palpable when president Donald Trump spoke at last year’s conference in Nashville, Tennessee, the crowd believes that of the two, Vance has the crypto chops. As Trump supporter Kelly Chandler puts it: “We're blessed to have an administration that's embracing bitcoin, and JD actually understands it.”
Many of the 35,000 conference goers identify as conservatives fed up with “woke nonsense.” But not everyone’s his fan. “About a week ago, if you’d asked me, ‘Who is JD Vance?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know, some politician,’” says Adam Walker, 42, a Nevada resident and self-described “political atheist.” He claims that setting up a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US, which Trump signed an order for in March, “strays from [bitcoin’s] original cypherpunk ideals.”
In the hall at the Venetian Hotel’s Convention and Expo Center are three of Elon Musk’s Cybertrucks, two of Trump’s sons, and a MAGA table selling sequined Trump jackets. This year, longtime conference goers describe an influx of “normies”—“sycophants of both” bitcoin and the state, says bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor, “even though these things are in conflict.”
Guys sporting American-flag-covered cowboy hats weave past men wearing turbans. Though the crowd remains overwhelmingly male and white, moms push strollers by the Black Blockchain Summit’s booth and head to the kids zone. Baseball caps that appear to support MAGA actually read “Bitcoin Made in America” or “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” (a giveaway from the restaurant Steak n’ Shake, which started accepting bitcoin in May). Tax accountants hand out branded Tide pens next to a company offering shirts with George Washington stomping on the letters “IRS.”
But underneath the patriotic decor remains a core of bitcoin holders who stand by the technology’s original ethos, which is firmly anti-state, as it was built to operate outside of governments and without centralized intermediaries. They frown upon the president issuing a Trump memecoin, which, with the family’s other crypto endeavors, reportedly bumped their wealth by roughly $2.9 billion.
At last year’s conference, excitement swelled around the idea of electing Trump, the country’s first bitcoin-embracing president, and ending what most felt was presidentBiden’s crypto-oppressive regime.
“Everybody in the world wants bitcoin,” Eric Trump, the recently announced cofounder and chief strategy officer of bitcoin mining company American Bitcoin, asserts, citing royal families, financial institutions, and family offices. “Look what Truth Social did,” he says of the publicly traded company, in which Trump and family own a majority stake, raising $2.5 billion to build a “bitcoin treasury.” Both he and Donald Trump Jr. give their estimates for bitcoin’s future price (more than $105,000 at time of writing) in one year—between $150,000 and $175,000.
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