Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
A guy, stool-bound inside the front door of PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, motioned for my ID. I reached for my wallet. But wait—turns out he wasn’t actually working the door. “We’re just trying to get people,” he told me, chortling. Epic prank, sir!
Hence got, I made my way to the bar’s backroom for a panel called “Coin Based: Concepts of a Plan for Nation-State Bitcoin Adoption.” “My how things have changed,” read the online event page. “Ideas that only a few weeks ago were laughed at by pundits and commentators are now on the table.”
It was time to decide what exactly the crypto community desires from the Trump administration on a policy level, and a few dozen guys had gathered to listen to a four-guy panel debate potential legislative achievements that could define Trump 2.0. It was off to an annoying start, as expected, but money buys you that right, even digital money.
The 2024 election was a crypto election, not because there is broad popular support for cryptocurrency, but because the “industry” paid handsomely to make it so. A small handful of sector whales raised an astonishing $238 million to influence the 2024 field, by far the most corporate cash of any industry. The majority of it went to super PACs, which spent well over $100 million on races all over the country. The sector kicked in another $17 million to lobby already-elected members of Congress. Already, one crypto super PAC, Fairshake, has raised over $100 million to influence the 2026 elections, as well.
Some of that money was spread out, bipartisan-like, but most of it went to Republicans, and a lot went to Trump. (His campaign began accepting donations in crypto last May.) Tech billionaires including the Winklevosses and Marc Andreessen piled millions into Trump’s campaign coffers, declaring that the Biden administration was at war with crypto. They bought Trump big at the height of his glide-path mania, at a time when an enfeebled Biden looked hopeless but hadn’t yet dropped out. Then came Kamala Harris, riding a frenzy of good feelings and robust polling before her post-convention nosedive. For months, it looked like dumb money.
But if the 2020s have taught us anything, it’s that dumb money is often a matter of timing. And in the end, crypto got their man. Now it is time to collect.
In late July, Trump made time for a keynote address at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” create a Bitcoin “strategic reserve,” implement a crypto advisory council, and fire pesky Securities and Exchange Commission ChairGary Gensler on Day 1.
“From now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” said the president, who had—much earlier—said that Bitcoin’s “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”
The financial world waits with bated breath to see just how handsome the take will be. At the very least, it looks to be a certainty that the industry will see the FIT21 bill resuscitated; that’s the crypto industry’s preferred “regulatory” standard that allows it to enjoy minimal oversight from the SEC, and which stalled out after passing in the House last year. The crypto council, after the first week, exists. Maybe next it’s the strategic reserve? (El Salvador owns 5,969 Bitcoins worth around $625 million; Syria is talking about embracing Bitcoin. This kind of thing is currently a flourish of failed and failing states. Why wouldn’t the U.S. get in line for that?)
The panel at the bar, four white dudes across—it’s Trump’s America, you can’t criticize this anymore!—was there to deliberate, before the enthusiasts, what some best-case policy scenarios would be. Among the panelists were David Zell, co-founder of the pro-Bitcoin think tank Bitcoin Policy Institute, and Drew Armstrong, the president and COO of Cathedra Bitcoin, which is a Bitcoin mining company. Also there was Bitcoin magazine writer “Shinobi,” who wore glasses and a balaclava and a hat that said “100k,” which is less than what a Bitcoin costs now, unless it has whipsawed back down by the time you read this.
The panel deliberated on three visions for making the U.S. government a bagholder of cryptocurrency, a surefire step to increasing the value of Bitcoin.
One is the concept of a Bitcoin strategic fund, which the panel-dwellers explained was a serious proposal that began “as a shitpost.” It’s pretty simple: The government would buy and hold a bunch of Bitcoin. If you’re thinking, Hey wait a second, inducing the government to buy this digital asset, the utility of which remains pretty unclear, sounds an awful lot like a scheme to drive up the price and valuations of the coin for all the people who already have it—allowing them to cash out while the government is stuck with a digital bauble that no one even seems to be claiming has any utility anymore—then … you probably don’t own any Bitcoin. There was no palpable worry about the value of their coin going down, anyway.
One Wyoming senator, Republican Cynthia Lummis, has already introduced a bill that would require the United States government to buy 1 million Bitcoins over five years. They cost $100,000 each. Where on earth is that money going to come from? Well, Zell explained, Lummis’ office believes that the government has enough money if it sells or borrows against (or otherwise engages in some accounting tricks with) its gold stocks, thus generating the funds necessary to buy that haul.
If the government could raise that revenue, why wouldn’t it just spend it on literally anything else? “If we’re gonna sell gold, we could use it to keep the Social Security Ponzi scheme going longer,” suggested Zell, noting a potential setback in that strategy. No matter.
Option two is what Trump pledged: to take all the coins the United States government has seized in its busting up of the online drug ring the Silk Road and the illicit exchange Bitfinex, package them in a fund, and call it a day. It’s ultimately a branding exercise. Would that do anything? Maybe not, but it would give the imprimatur of government support, and thus make cryptocurrencies seem more legit.
The third thing would be an executive order, which Trump has already proven adept at, to create an exchange stabilization fund at the Treasury that would allow it to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin as though it were a foreign currency. But that, too, presented some legal and technical challenges—most of which, I’ll be honest, I can’t pretend to have fully understood.
I was trying to be serious about this, earnestly attempting to make sense of the rationale for the U.S. getting in the Bitcoin game. But there was a lot of overly technical language. There were digressions about “ossification” and “protocol.” There were jokes that didn’t scan to me at all. (“I don’t think the U.S. government is going to smashbuy on Coinbase,” Armstrong said at one point, to laughs.)
But the one thing that was for certain is that everyone was going to get very rich. “We’re overexcited because Trump is going to pump our bags to kingdom come,” warned one attendee during the question-and-answer period, an injunction to take this responsibility seriously.
Not everyone was in agreement about what that responsibility was—or whether it was to the country or the coin. Zell said the U.S. government should be buying Bitcoin; Shinobi disagreed.
There was consensus on certain things. One was that the federal deficit was out of control, and needed cutting. There was some suggestion that the federal government could buy a bunch of Bitcoin, let it appreciate, then sell it to pay down the debt. Shinobi, who was against the strategic reserve purchases, said that the deficit was already so astronomical that the country was basically a lost cause.
In the case of a great-powers contest with China or Russia, it would be advantageous, some thought, for the U.S. to own Bitcoin, just because it meant that there would be less Bitcoin for China or Russia to own. Hoarding resources was always good policy. Also, infrastructure spending might be good.
Cut the deficit, prepare for war, hoard resources and wealth. Strip away the technical language, and these some are the oldest, most traditional conservative shibboleths. Reading recommendations were made; a pamphlet published by the Koch-founded Cato Institute was praised.
In this, it didn’t feel like the room was planning for the future of the nation state, but the perpetuation of the GOP.
Surely, you might be thinking, this panel was an exercise in hypotheticals; these are not the crypto people who have the president’s ear. But actually, the distance between Bitcoin think tanks and Bitcoin media and the powerful Bitcoin lobbying apparatus is not very great. Zell encouraged attendees to call Lummis’ office and speak directly with her staff. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, now one of the most formidable faces in Washington, endorsed a plan calling for all governments to hold Bitcoin just a day after I attended the panel. So this, now, is what the smoke-filled rooms full of elites making high-level policy decisions for the rest of the country look like. (It’s vape smoke, to be clear.)
Right before the inauguration, the Republican president launched a meme coin, called $TRUMP, and ran up a fortune worth billions, quadrupling his wealth in one day. Then the first lady did the same with a $MELANIA coin. The leader of the world’s foremost empire is engaged in a get-rich-quick scheme that would put late-night infomercialists to shame.
Did Bitcoin exist to “bring down the government,” as Shinobi’s bio on X said, or did it exist to advance a muscled-up American empire? There was some risk, Shinobi said, that enthusiasts were losing sight of the original plan to make the world better. How was Bitcoin going to do that? Alas, that was not a topic anyone had come to discuss.
“It is prudent to own Bitcoin,” concluded Zell.
I eavesdropped as a woman and a man made small talk to my left. The bar accepts Bitcoin as payment, which the man was excited to inform her about. “You can use Bitcoin!” he said. “Did you use Bitcoin?”
She looked confused. “I just had water,” she replied.
Get the best of news and politics
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.
This post was originally published on here
