I was told there would be a diamond-encrusted steak.
One hot May morning in Las Vegas, I was wandering through the art gallery section of the cavernous convention hall at The Venetian Resort’s hotel and casino—where 35,000 crypto enthusiasts were gathered for the seventh annual Bitcoin conference—in search of Rare, by artist Maxfield Mellenbruch.
He had supposedly transformed a hunk of meat into “an exquisite combination of platinum and 216 carats of diamonds and rubies,” according to the description on the conference website. “Much like Bitcoin itself, Rare challenges conventional ideas of value, art, and asset.” The piece, which had been appraised for $2.2 million and would be auctioned off during the conference, was nowhere to be found among the portraits of Pepe the Frog and Bitcoin-themed Warhol soup can knock-offs.
Instead, the exhibit that seemed to be commanding the most attention was considerably less dazzling: A dingy gray sweatsuit, a plain white T-shirt neatly folded on top of a mesh bag, and a pair of beat-up sneakers, each framed and mounted on a gallery wall. I assumed these must be some kind of high-concept installation—until I read the text that accompanied them. Not just random laundry, these objéts were Ross Ulbricht’s uniform when he had served 11 years of a life sentence in various prisons for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet.
For many at the conference, Ulbricht was not a criminal but a visionary victim, indeed almost a Christ-like figure. An early champion of cryptocurrency, he had been maligned, persecuted, and now, thanks to a pardon from President Trump, he had risen triumphant.
And so had the price of Bitcoin. Less than a week before the conference began, it hit an all-time high of just under $112,000, up from about $70,000 a year earlier. Repeatedly, speakers at the conference told the story of crypto’s fall from grace and its astonishing comeback. In his opening address, Grant McCarty, co-president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, reminisced about the first conference after one of the largest crypto trading platforms, FTX, was revealed in 2022 to be a fraud and the price of Bitcoin had tanked to less than $20,000. “Politicians at the time were calling for federal bans,” he said. “Nightly news insisted that only criminals and bad people were using this technology.” Crypto’s future looked bleak—but McCarty would not be deterred, so he decided to form the Bitcoin Policy Institute. “We started out as a handful of true believers with basically a Google Doc, a prayer, and an absolute conviction that Bitcoin is good for the world,” he said, earnestly enunciating every syllable.
Two years later, their prayers seem to have been answered. Bitcoin’s market cap is now estimated at about $2.1 trillion, the seventh largest asset on Earth, and Bitcoiners at the conference were jubilant. Wearing tracksuits, blazers, and mini-skirts in bright orange, the official color of Bitcoin, their T-shirts said “Our Founding Fathers Wanted Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Saves.” They played a life-size version of the game Guess Who?, where the people on the cards were crypto celebs. At the marketplace section of the expo hall, they bought (in Bitcoin, of course) a kids’ card game called The Inflation Monster, meant to teach the evils of fiat—crypto enthusiasts’ word for traditional money. They bought underwear and bras emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo and baby onesies with phrases like “Hodl me tight,” a reference to a misspelling of the word “hold” that became a meme about the importance of not selling your Bitcoin. They bought psychedelic artwork that depicted banking regulators as ghoulish figures presiding over a Monopoly board.
And they bought MAGA gear: “Trump 2028” hats, a framed AI-generated portrait of President Trump holding a Bitcoin, a bag of coffee called Bitcoin Blend featuring a picture of, yes, the 47th president of the United States. But Trump hasn’t always been a Bitcoin hero. He dismissed it during his first term—in a 2019 tweet, he called digital currencies “not money” and “based on thin air.” But in the last few years, he has changed his mind, likely prompted by his sons, who have extensive Bitcoin business interests. The real Trump lovefest, I learned, began at the previous year’s conference, where Trump had stopped on the campaign trail to assure this crowd that he intended to become “the crypto president.” He became the first presidential candidate from a major party to accept crypto donations; at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Shortly before he was inaugurated, he launched his own digital currency, the $TRUMP meme coin, which has earned him an estimated $1 billion. (First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t so lucky—her meme coin, launched shortly after her husband’s, has plummeted in value.) Just a few days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order vowing to explore establishing an American strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Three Bitcoin bills, aimed at establishing a regulatory structure that would legitimize the currency, are currently making their way through Congress; another, the BITCOIN Act, would create the strategic reserve that Trump had promised.
Bitcoin’s redemption story imbued the conference with an energy that I can only describe as quasi-religious. The mood bore a striking resemblance to what I experienced at the prayer rallies and church services I have attended while reporting on Christian nationalism. With the unquestioning intensity of their crypto faith informing every conversation, conference attendees behaved like proselytizers. But instead of Christianity, this was a new American religion, complete with deities (the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto), prophets (Trump), and even nearly martyred saints with relics (Ulbricht and his sweat suit).
As with all true believers, the danger of extremism is ever-present. During the conference, I began to see hints that this devotion to digital currency had become an all-consuming obsession— for attendees and the politicians and industry leaders on stage.
The more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”
In his keynote, Michael Saylor, whose cloud-computing company, Strategy, owns nearly 600,000 Bitcoins—approximately worth $60 billion—urged the crowd to “become an evangelist for economic freedom.” Saylor, who has advocated for Bitcoin to be exempt from capital gains tax, said that the more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”
This is when most stories on cryptocurrency attempt to explain it in layman’s terms. It’s a big spreadsheet! It’s a robot bank! It’s digital Pokémon cards!
The good news is that if you don’t completely get it, you don’t have to for this story. All you need to know is this: When crypto fans talk about how Bitcoin (or any other crypto, of which there are many) is going to help you cast off the yoke of extractive big banks, or stick it to woke lenders, or help the underclass build generational wealth, they might earnestly believe those things. But there is a much more basic reason that they want everyone to buy Bitcoin, and it has to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand. There is a fixed amount of this currency—21 million to be exact—and the more people who have decided that Bitcoin is desirable, the more it’s worth. If you buy Bitcoin, the value of their Bitcoin goes up. Their investment is predicated on making you buy Bitcoin. In this way, it’s a little like multi-level marketing, like Avon or Amway. Given those terms, the evangelizing begins to make a lot more sense.
Nearly all the panels reinforced this message. Consider “Marketing Bitcoin to the Masses,” which took place the first afternoon and featured Brian E. De Mint, author of the 2022 book Bitcoin Evangelism: Planting Seeds for the Decentralized Revolution, sharing his strategy for “orange-pilling,” or convincing the uninitiated of Bitcoin’s greatness. He pointed to the early Christians who “spread the religion to people who didn’t believe in a God, and then they spread the religion to the pagan people who believed in a higher power, but perhaps another God.” Extending the metaphor, he described those who were skeptical of all crypto as “atheists,” and those who had accepted crypto but not Bitcoin as pagans.
The list of Bitcoin’s alleged powers is long and weird. The author of a parenting book called I Am Not Your Bruh told me he believed that buying Bitcoin made people better at child-rearing. “When you embrace Bitcoin,” he said, “you can think beyond just yourself and your lifetime—it makes you more inspired to be intentional with your parenting.” In my quest to see the diamond-encrusted steak, I talked to a curator who claimed Bitcoin had liberated artists from rapacious galleries. At one panel, it was revealed that Bitcoin could stop human trafficking; at another, I learned that it could reduce Americans’ reliance on pharma companies and improve our diet. “There’s no point in having long-term regenerative health if you don’t have long-term regenerative wealth,” said an Australian chef influencer, cryptically. Paolo Ardoino, the Italian billionaire CEO of the crypto company Tether explained, “I know that people think about Bitcoin as the digital gold, but I prefer to think in Bitcoin terms. It’s almost like [gold] is the natural Bitcoin.”
“Gold is imperfect,” he said. “Bitcoin is perfect.”
It’s one thing when your libertarian uncle prattles on about the virtues of Bitcoin at Thanksgiving. And believe me, I met your libertarian uncle at this conference, many, many times over. (One of them referred to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is no fan of the currency, as “Lie-awatha.”) But it’s a wholly different experience to hear elected officials and members of America’s first family make those same pitches.
The first day of the conference featured a “Code and Country” program, a celebration of the blossoming relationship between the government and Bitcoin. But in the midst of the euphoria, the conference seemed ambivalent about setting the mood for the day: serious and dignified, or bedazzled orange YOLO? In the biggest room, on the Nakamoto Stage, between speakers, a string quartet clad in concert black solemnly performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” then the British miniskirt-clad emcee tried to pump up the crowd about the price of Bitcoin. “Do we think we’re gonna hit another all-time high in the next few days?” she bellowed. “A little bit more energy! Do we think we can? Yes, of course we are!” (They didn’t.)
About halfway through the first morning of the conference, Sen. Jim Justice (R-W. Va.) took the stage. Next to him, panting, on a folding chair, was Babydog, a celebrity in her own right. Babydog is his five-year-old English bulldog whose star turn began as a mascot for Justice’s Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 when he was governor of West Virginia. The senator began speaking about Toby and Edith, a fictional couple useful in speeches as a generic stand-in for solid, middle-class Americans. For Bitcoin to truly succeed in America, he said, there needed to be a way for Toby and Edith to use it at Walmart, thereby “saving all kinds of money” and “contributing to all kinds of goodness.” But Toby and Edith wouldn’t do that until they really understood Bitcoin. “When Toby and Edith get it,” he continued, “then everything starts happening at light speed for all of us, all the legislation, everything, in every way!” The crowd murmured approvingly.
I suspect that Toby and Edith’s reluctance to jump on the crypto bandwagon had less to do with their not understanding it and more to do with the many well-publicized scams that have besmirched the industry. A non-exhaustive list of the most egregious: the 2014 OneCoin Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of over $4 billion with a fake cryptocurrency; BitConnect, which promised absurd returns via a “trading bot” and collapsed in 2018; a Chinese scam called PlusToken stole more than $2 billion from users. In 2022, the conflagration of the crypto exchange FTX revealed massive fraud and mismanagement by founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had promised to put billions of his own crypto wealth toward charitable causes but ended up spending investors’ money, bankrupting the company, and being sentenced to 25 years in prison.
So it’s hardly surprising that Congress felt the need to get involved and write up several new crypto bills. Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, they aim to fix the scams through clearer regulation. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) would make crypto subject to regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act would establish new oversight bodies, rein in advertising, and require companies to write contracts in plain language; Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) Cryptocurrency Accountability Act would require more transparency in lawmakers’ crypto holdings. It’s unclear how effective these laws would be. The biggest problem is that they lack provisions that would require customer insurance and real-time audits—meaning consumers aren’t robustly protected and it could take months or even years for regulators to catch on to fraud.
Later, I caught up with Justice as he and Babydog were heading out of the conference hall. I asked him if he was worried that the new bills didn’t offer enough consumer protection. “Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way,” he said. “Because really and truly, the way the crypto world works, there is such a paper trail, it is unbelievable. So for people to be able to cheat, it’s very difficult to do. I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”
“Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way…I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”
Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who holds Bitcoin, also told me he thought crypto was good for America. I asked him to help me understand why. “Why is the internet good for America?” he retorted. “Like, it’s a dumb question that you’re asking me. It’s like asking, ‘What are we going to do with the Internet?’” He used the same analogy to explain his opinion on regulations for consumer protection. “When the internet was a thing, Congress didn’t put in a bunch of rules around the internet before it even got started,” he said. “They had, like, 10 years of hands-off. And this is what this industry needs.”
The conference attendees I spoke to also seemed to favor loose regulations. Brian Johnson had traveled nearly 1,800 miles from Huntsville, Alabama, to Las Vegas and was wearing a shirt from last year’s conference that said “FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP.” He said he thought the free market could take care of bad actors by making their companies fail. What about the people who lose money because of scams like FTX? I asked. “It sucks,” he said, shrugging. “You have to just do due diligence and invest and understand the risks.” Tyler Williams, who was from Orange County, California, and was wearing an American flag-themed shorts set, told me he didn’t believe that consumer protections worked, anyway. “If you have actually had a true economic collapse of money, I would be truly concerned if those FDIC protections would ever even be there,” he said.
Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) agreed. During her speech later that day, she praised “the people who will be undaunted by our government’s reluctance to let us think freely and embrace the freedom that technology is going to add” to all of our lives. Lummis has spoken publicly about the fact that she owns Bitcoin but in 2021, she failed to disclose a Bitcoin purchase of as much as $100,000 within the designated reporting timeframe of 45 days, thus breaking a law meant to prevent members of Congress from using their inside knowledge of pending legislation to influence their investments. (Lummis attributed the delay to a clerical error; her office resolved the situation with the Ethics committee.) “You can see it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can just see what this country can do!”
One of the themes that emerged in my reporting on Christian nationalism was persecution—specifically the idea that Christians were being oppressed and hunted the world over because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Persecution is a powerful narrative because it gives the persecuted group a sense of unity and purpose. Frederick Clarkson, a researcher who has long studied the Christian right at the pro-democracy think tank Political Research Associates, told me that in many charismatic communities, the idea of persecution binds a group together that might not otherwise have much in common. “Once you’ve established that people are in a community together and that there’s some formidable opponent that’s out to get us, and we’re all together,” he said, “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”
At the Bitcoin conference, that sense of underdog righteousness was on full display. On the second day of the conference, President Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, spoke on a panel. Its official title was “Bitcoin as a Public Asset: The Rise of New Bitcoin Models,” but the Trump brothers appeared to be more interested in crafting a tale of parallel redemptions, how both their family and the crypto community had triumphed over adversity. Had the Biden administration succeeded in passing anti-crypto legislation, they might not be sitting there today, said another panelist. “We could be in orange for Bitcoin, but it would be an orange jumpsuit!” quipped Don Jr. Audience members hooted appreciatively.
In another panel, Don Jr. told the head of the right-wing social media platform Rumble about how his family had been ostracized by the finance community. “The second we got in the political spectrum, the guy that I could have called two weeks prior in New York and gotten a loan for a building in about five minutes, all of a sudden, that guy wouldn’t even take my calls,” he groused. “We’re getting de-banked, we’re getting de-insured, we’re getting de-everythinged.”
“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.”
It was that treatment, he said, that prompted him to explore the world of cryptocurrency. For the Trump family, the stakes are personal. In addition to Trump’s meme coin, the Trump family owns 60 percent of World Liberty Financial, a digital assets firm that has brought in at least $550 million in crypto sales. Eric serves as chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a mining operation. Earlier this year, his family business, the Trump Organization, sued Capital One bank, claiming that the company had closed their accounts as a punishment for Trump’s involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. More likely, it was the fact that in 2022, the Trump Organization committed financial crimes, convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records.
“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community,” said Eric. “And I’m not sure without you we would have won the same way [without you]. I think we would have won, but I’m not sure if we would have won in the same decisive manner.” The crowd erupted in applause.
The themes were the same in the highly anticipated keynote address from Vice President JD Vance. By the time I arrived at the press area, the snaking queue to hear the speech filled two floors of the Venetian’s cavernous conference wing. Someone handed me an orange flier about the “prisoners of war” who were still serving time for crypto-related crimes. Its title read, presumably in a nod to the Old Testament story of Moses, “LET OUR PEOPLE GO!”
Vance began by cheering the end of “four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators,” adding, triumphantly, “As you know, there’s new sheriff in town!” He was there at the conference to announce “loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally.”
Vance, who owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, according to financial disclosures he filed last year, described Bitcoin as a democratizing force. “I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have,” he said. “In recent years, I’m hard pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”
Things were less democratic here at the conference where, if you wanted to see what your theoretical American crypto fortune could someday buy, you would have been out of luck. Later that day, I headed back to the gallery area in search of the steak. I flagged down the curator, who told me it was on display in the VIP area, accessible only to holders of $9,499 “Whale Pass.” The conference organizers were trying to figure out how to display it for a few hours for the hoi polloi in the main conference area, but marshaling the necessary security was proving difficult. I had to catch my flight before I ever got to glimpse the diamond-encrusted steak.
Many of the Christian nationalists I’ve met described their effort to spread their religion using metaphors of war: a battle between good and evil, a “spiritual war” against a satanic “enemy.” In the weeks leading up to the Capital insurrection, several prominent pastors used these images in speeches they made about how they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. Clarkson, the religion researcher, has observed that some evangelical Christian leaders use imagery of fighting “to get people psychologically primed,” he told me. “They’re going to be the heroes in the end times army.”
In his speech, Vance joked, “The Secret Service is a little bit nervous, because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” he said. “But they really like the president, vice President of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing okay.”
But would they always really like him? There are members of the crypto community who believe that only a revolution will truly liberate the masses from the chains of the current financial system. In an eponymous session, panelists debated whether Bitcoiners had become “sycophants of the state;” another described “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776,” with the currency itself as a form of revolution. The moderator, who goes by the name GMoney and is the host of the Bitcoin-focused podcast Rugpull Radio (40,000 listeners per episode on Rumble), said he thought neither party had any business bogging down crypto with cumbersome federal legislation. “Fuck this dick-sucking of the Republican party that’s going on, like this is absurd,” he growled. “We are a powerful political contingency at this point in time. Why the fuck are we on our knees in front of the Republican Party when we should be asking for the opposite?” He had more choice words for the idea of a federal Bitcoin reserve. “You want to put the same fucking retards that destroyed the economic system in charge of a large portion of Bitcoin?” he said. “Like, that’s fucking dumb.”
Toward the end of his speech, Vance told the crowd that as advocates for crypto, they were fighting for the people. “I see crypto as a hedge against one of the most dangerous trends in the digital era,” he said, “elites who, rather than innovate themselves, prefer to simply take over and co-opt cutting-edge technologies to assert their control over other people.” It was a bold statement for a Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley alum who now held the second-highest office in the nation. Did he not worry, I wondered, that the revolution crowd might someday decide he was a member of the elite that needed to be hedged against?
When I got home, I discovered that the steak had been auctioned off for a little more than a quarter of its $2.2 million appraisal. I also watched Ulbricht’s speech, which I missed because I left early. Ulbricht, whose title was listed as “freedom fighter,” recalled a time he had successfully removed seven wasps’ nests from a porch. The wasps’ power, he explained, was in their decentralization, just like Bitcoin, which was distributed instead of residing in a single bank. “We’re not there yet—there is still more freedom to be won,” he said. “I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for.”