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This message comes from Range Rover Sport, British by design, with power, poise, and performance in mind. Working to provide an uncompromising take on sporting luxury. Explore Range Rover Sport at rangerover.com slash US slash sport. This is Planet Money from NPR. Back at the end of May, I went to a bar in Greenwich Village in New York City. Hi, pleasure to meet you. Wow.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's a Bitcoin bar where you can buy an actual beer with virtual currency. This is a dive bar. Yeah, but it looks really nice. I would say we're a luxury dive bar. So, you know, dive bars are approachable places for everybody. The first person I meet is a guy named Mike Germano. He's one of the people that runs this place.
It's called HubKey and it's not normally open for lunch, but it is today because so many people are here. We're a little extra special Italian back there because it's pizza day, the most important holiday in the Bitcoin calendar. Today, everyone is particularly jazzed because it's the 15th anniversary of the very first time someone used Bitcoin to buy a thing. And that thing was pizza.
There are stacks of pizza boxes in the back room where people are eating. And I can smell the pies. But there is another reason why all these people are at the bar on this particular day. They're kind of like pilgrims stopping at this weigh station on a journey to a much bigger gathering. One guy even came here from Singapore.
Their destination, the most important event of the year for Bitcoiners, the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas. And appropriately for a pilgrimage, there's a shrine. You know, if you walk into the right, there's kind of our shrine to all the Bitcoin culture.
Over here? Yeah. Okay, so what are we looking at? So once again, here's our shrine. Behind the bar, there are shelves full of Bitcoin memorabilia. There's a package of orange Tic Tacs and a little orange phone-sized computer that mines Bitcoin and a misfits action figure. I like the nesting dolls. Right in the center of the display, there are brightly painted Russian dolls. That happened to have all the people gone to jail for fraud in the crypto world.
So you might remember the largest one there. That was the founder of FTX. It's Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who was convicted of fraud and money laundering. He's fighting the charges. They all are. Then it's Alex Mashinsky from Celsius and the little one there that kicked it all off. In this bar and in the Bitcoin world and crypto in general, outlaws can be heroes. The Terra Luna disaster. Bitcoin are the most powerful.
have long seen themselves as a liberation force, and they think governments and banks are in their way. So it was a big day about nine months ago when a presidential candidate showed up here to do something no other major presidential candidate had done before. While we're standing right here where it took place next to the Bitcoin shrine, can you describe what happened?
When President Trump visited? Yeah, so... The other guy who runs the bar jumps in. His name is Thomas Pacquia. President Trump bought 50 burgers and 50 Diet Cokes, and he used Bitcoin to facilitate the transaction. Right here, right where we are, where you're sitting. Yeah. It was a surreal day. Nine months later, people at this bar are happy because Trump is smiling on crypto. They're happy because Bitcoin has just hit an all-time high, and they're happy because they're headed to Las Vegas.
Out on the street, before I leave PubKey, Mike introduces me to Frank Korva. He's actually the best journalist in the space and covers the White House. So this is the exact person you should... You were the one who just got your White House credential? Frank is with Bitcoin Magazine, and he now has a hard pass to cover the White House.
He'll also be on the pilgrimage to Vegas, where he'll be live streaming the conference. And with just a few days to go, he's thinking about how this year will be so different from all the previous ones. So Bitcoin is the separation of money and state. So it feels a little bit weird to have so many representatives from the state, quote unquote, there. We have a number of high level speakers. It's the speaker list that got us interested.
There are so many big Trump world names, from Vice President J.D. Vance to two of the president's sons, to the son of the U.S. Commerce Secretary, to one of the most famous crypto outlaws newly freed by Trump, all of them headed for Vegas.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Reporter Andrea Bernstein and her colleague Ilya Meritz have been covering Trump and his businesses for years. So we sent them to the Venetian resort to join these thousands of pilgrims traveling to Las Vegas to hear from their newest leaders. What happens when the president of the United States showers his love on the crypto community while becoming a crypto entrepreneur himself?
Today on the show, three whirlwind days in Las Vegas, where crypto convicts are cheered, oversight and regulation are booed, and the separation of crypto and state no longer applies. Plus, the inside story of Trump's love affair with crypto. What we saw in Vegas is not going to stay in Vegas.
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So Andrea and I fly to Las Vegas. We set ourselves up in the vast windowless conference hall of the Venetian. And right away, we encounter a strangely high number of people wearing orange. Orange neckties, orange suits, orange bikini tops. Orange, it turns out, is the color of Bitcoin. People who go all in on Bitcoin talk about getting orange-pilled. Then there's another thing we notice. I see all this like kind of crypto-related art.
It's an art exhibit that I am still thinking about today because of how clearly it shows the way outlaw culture is baked into crypto culture. I'm standing near some pictures of world currencies on fire when I meet a guy named Majid Zafer. Did you see the Ross Albright auctions? No. Those are really cool. He was the founder of Silk Road. Yeah.
This is the thing I'm still thinking about. An art auction to raise money for Ross Ulbricht. Because Ulbricht was convicted and sent to prison 10 years ago for operating a dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were bought and sold anonymously. It was called Silk Road, and the whole thing ran on Bitcoin. He was given...
two life sentences. The prosecutor called him a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people's addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people. Ulbricht was separately charged with attempted witness murder. That case was dropped after his two life sentences were upheld in the Supreme Court. But on President Trump's first full day in office this year, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht.
and in the program for this Bitcoin conference. Ulbricht's picture is front and center. Ross Ulbricht, freedom fighter, right next to J.D. Vance, vice president. And now I'm looking at a whole wall of Ulbricht's prison paraphernalia that's up for auction. ID cards, a sweatsuit, some paintings he did. And my new buddy Majid is telling me he's willing to overlook Ulbricht's crimes. I mean, if you think about
For Majid, it's about what Ulbricht did for Bitcoin. He showed how it could work in a real marketplace.
one of the first people to really bring commercial legitimacy to the technology. We went back to the Ulbricht Wall a few times, and no one we talked to objected to this convicted criminal being celebrated. And it occurred to me that Ulbricht's reversal in fortune tracks with a broader turnaround. Maybe the whole crypto world, its history of fraud and swindles, was being pardoned.
There are all kinds of people at this conference. Families with strollers, high-end executives, influencers, people who are just getting interested.
Some of them because of President Trump's enthusiasm. Like Stephen Dale Hyde. He's a lawyer from San Antonio, 61, tall, goes by Esteban sometimes because he spent so much of his life in Mexico. He's been watching Bitcoin for a while. My wife is into it big time. She's been talking about it for years now. And I'm the one that's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's just like pie in the sky. He started thinking his wife might be right, though, during the presidential campaign.
He said he felt the whole Bitcoin thing mushrooming. And I'm saying if Trump gets elected, this is going to go up. But I did my research. I got the crypto app. And then I got stuck with the whole wallet thing for whatever reason. It is a well-known and longstanding problem that buying Bitcoin is just not so simple, even today.
So he didn't buy any, and he watched the price go up. Oh man, $107,000. I could have bought one at $60,000, almost $70,000. He put the whole idea of buying Bitcoin aside for a while. But then it came up again recently. Stephen was watching a personal finance YouTube channel, and an ad came on. It was actually advertising this conference. And I just said, what the heck?
And I'm like, I'm just going to go over there and get into it. How long ago was this? This? This was two days ago. That you made this decision? Yeah. Just overnight. Incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just like that. So he's been here not even one whole day. And I hear him becoming convinced Bitcoin is on the rise. I mean, the whole thing, because it's not really just a currency. It's a movement. And it's an ideology as well. Talking with Stephen, it hit me how much the value of money is psychological.
We believe in U.S. dollars because we believe the U.S. government stands behind them. It's actually one of the few things almost all Americans still agree on. And millions of people believe in Bitcoin because millions of people believe in Bitcoin. Having the support of the U.S. president could draw in a lot more people. If Trump had lost the election, would you be getting into Bitcoin? Probably not. That's a really hard question.
We say our goodbyes for now.
And one of the things that we came here for was to listen in to what all these top Trump world people would say to this very friendly crowd. Of course, the new guy from the Washington press corps was there at the anchor desk right outside the door. Frank Corvo, White House correspondent for Bitcoin magazine. Frank had wondered back at the Bitcoin bar what it would mean for Bitcoin to get such a firm embrace from the establishment.
during a break in his anchoring duties. He said, "Now that we're here, the hug seemed even tighter than he'd expected."
A lot of politicians are here. I think this idea that Bitcoin is no longer a countercultural thing, it is now just a part of the mainstream, it's part of the political process, the vibe has shifted. Over the next three days, the conversations Frank and Stephen from Texas and all of us heard on stage were surprisingly unguarded. And in bits and pieces, the speakers told us the story of a kind of a romance between the Trump world and the crypto world.
It was like a rom-com. Like, at first, they hated each other. Or at least, the way Donald Trump Jr. told it during an interview on stage...
They were not interested. What I realized was, you know, I wasn't an early adapter like so many of the people in the room that were here in 2012 or something like that. We were later. We were, you know, real estate guys. We were hard assets. We built buildings. Back then, President Trump wasn't into crypto either. During his first term, he wrote on Twitter, I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money.
He said their value was based on thin air and that unregulated crypto assets could facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade. But it wasn't long before the Trump family began to turn around on crypto, as Don Jr. told the story. That happened after January 6th.
Donald Trump had been suspended from social media and his family business was dropped by some banks after he encouraged the attack on the Capitol. On stage, Don Jr. complained bitterly about how mistreated and censored the family felt. We're getting debanked. We're getting de-insured. We're getting de-everything. The Trumps never lost access to banking entirely. But still, crypto seemed so inviting. When did you get orange-pilled?
Honestly, during that same period of time, I mean, I think there's so many natural ties between free speech, crypto, Bitcoin. The sons were in, but their father, not yet. Did you orange pill your dad? No.
Well, you know, I think, honestly, between, you know, my brother and I, you know, probably definitely, you know, did some of that. According to the story unfolding at the conference, the relationship between Donald Trump himself and crypto didn't really blossom until a year ago. Trump had just been convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
which he's still challenging. It was right on the heels of that whole sham trial that they put the president through. A crypto venture capitalist named David Sachs told the story of Trump's first serious flirtation with the crypto world during a conversation on the main stage.
Sachs said it was at a fundraising dinner he held in San Francisco for Trump. This was June 6th of last year. I remember that date because that happens to be D-Day. Sachs said about a third of the people he invited were crypto entrepreneurs. And up until this point, Trump and crypto people hadn't really had the chance to talk to each other much. And no one knew exactly how he would be received. But at this very nice dinner in San Francisco...
There was a spark. And I think it was maybe one of the first times that he had heard this message about how unfairly that, you know, all the crypto people were being treated by the Gensler SEC. The name Gary Gensler came up a lot. He was Biden's appointee to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. And when anyone on stage would mention him, people would boo. The crypto world hates Gensler for what they see as years of regulatory overreach.
And in Sachs' story about the fundraising dinner, his guests finally had the chance to explain to Trump how in their minds there was a war on crypto. And so I think he really understood the plight of the crypto community because they were being subjected to the same kind of unfair persecution that he was. And that's when their gripes became Trump's gripes, too, according to Sachs and the others on stage with him.
Just a month later, Trump told Bitcoiners, if elected, he'd fire Gary Gensler. So this was a moment where Trump and crypto discovered they were a match made in heaven. Trump got so much applause for that line, he repeated himself. On stage at the Bitcoin conference, we also heard a parallel story, a really important one that I hadn't quite understood before.
Basically, at this moment that Donald Trump started courting crypto votes on the campaign trail, he and his sons were starting crypto businesses. And at first, as Don Jr. told it, there was a lot to figure out.
I'm a late-ish adapter. And when I'm calling my friends who've been doing it forever, like, OK, how do I do this again so I don't send someone a fairly large piece of money and don't get it wrong? They figured it out. And pretty soon, the Trump family was all over crypto. They launched a crypto financial services company. They started a Trump meme coin, a first lady meme coin, a stable coin, a Bitcoin mining operation.
And even while we were all at the conference, there was another new thing. Trump's social media company announced it was raising $2.5 billion from investors to buy Bitcoin. That's a pretty big deal, right? I mean...
You know, there's not a lot of people, there's not a lot of people that have done something that big or shown that level of commitment. During the three days of interviews and talks, we listened to a parade of administration officials lay out all that Trump has done for cryptocurrency since he won the election and became president.
Gary Gensler resigned. Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht. His SEC dropped investigations into crypto companies. And his Department of Justice disbanded its national cryptocurrency enforcement team. Trump set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, like a pile of gold, but Bitcoin.
David Sachs, who threw the San Francisco fundraising dinner for Trump, he's now the White House crypto and AI czar. Trump also invited all the crypto and Bitcoin bigwigs to the White House. The titans, the donors, the cabinet secretaries and regulators. They all sat down together in the White House state dining room. All of these moves have been very, very good for this crowd. And they've been good for the Trump family. We asked the White House about this and they sent a statement saying,
President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world and revolutionizing our digital financial technology. His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest. The Trump Organization did not respond to our request for comment. In the past year, according to Forbes, crypto has added $1 billion to Donald Trump's $6 billion net worth.
It will soon be more, Forbes says, possibly billions more. So that's how Trump is profiting from crypto. When we return, how the crypto industry is profiting from Trump.
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Wandering the halls of this Bitcoin conference is a little like how I picture Burning Man, this community that comes together IRL only once a year, with zany costumes and DJs and all these different places to make a friend or just chill out. By day two, I start to suspect everyone has swallowed the orange pill. Steven, the guy from San Antonio who's here dabbling with the idea of becoming a Bitcoiner, he's been wowed by the speeches so far. What's his name, the Italian guy who's the owner of Tether?
Never seen him before, never heard about him before. I'd kind of just heard the word tether. It was really interesting for me to listen to him
Paolo Arduino is the CEO of Tether, and he spoke about bringing crypto to the masses around the world. The digital dollar for the hundreds of millions of people that are living in emerging markets, developing countries, that are left behind by the traditional financial system. Tether makes a particular kind of digital currency called stablecoins. Unlike Bitcoin, stablecoins are tied to the value of something more conventional —
like the U.S. dollar. We started to realize that money is the ultimate social network. I think Bitcoin is actually the ultimate social network. When Paolo wasn't on stage, he found a quiet hallway to talk with me. Do you want to sit, stand? Okay, then I can stand. Paolo is 40 years old. He wears all black. And when he moves around the conference, he has two muscly guys, also in black, clearing a path for him so he can type on his phone as he walks.
Vegas, I must say, is a bit too much for me. And if on the stage the Trumps talked about how good the crypto romance is for them, what I got from Paolo is a sense of what the romance is doing for a business like his. Paolo told me he had never once been to the U.S. until this past March. Actually, this year in 2025 was the first year I came to the United States. And he started big.
On March 6th, he posted an image from his visit to the White House and another from outside the Capitol. We have some good conversations with the Trump administration. Never met the president himself. We have good conversations with lawmakers on the Senate and representatives of the House. President Trump has been urging Congress to pass a bill lightning fast to bring stablecoin like Tether into the mainstream. And Trump has his own stablecoin called USD1.
People who study the financial system worry stablecoin could introduce all kinds of risk. And Tether has been used by drug runners and to evade sanctions. The company says it's now working on these issues with U.S. law enforcement. So Tether has connections in Washington. Another one is through the company's financial partner, Cantor Fitzgerald. When they first started working together, Cantor's chairman was Howard Lutnick.
And he is now Trump's commerce secretary. Palo says he and Howard don't talk anymore. There could be a conflict of interest. But on stage at the conference, Palo appeared with another Lutnik. I'm joined here by my friend, Brendan, the new chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald at 27.
Tell us all about that. Howard's son, Brandon Lutnick, took over for his dad as the bank's chairman. It's really a blessing to be here, especially on stage with you, Paolo.
He's wearing a well-fitted suit and bookish glasses. So that's the talk that impressed Stephen Dale Height. He told me after watching Paolo, he sees how useful stablecoins like Tether can be, both abroad and right here at home.
And that is all Paolo. Here's the thing, though. Tether's coins are not dollars. They're not backed by the U.S. government. But with so many friends in high places, you could get that impression. So many of the people on stage at this conference are big winners under this new crypto regime. Not a lot of people are talking about who loses because they're all here to try to win. But while we were saving our seats for Vice President J.D. Vance's speech...
I met a guy who made it clear for me how completely the odds can be stacked against people who are not on the inside. His name is Will. His day job is at an investment advisory firm. He didn't want to say his last name because he was worried being connected with Bitcoin could hurt him in his work life.
I met a lot of Bitcoiners who felt like this. So, Will from Salt Lake City and I got to talking about meme coins. They're collectibles, like baseball cards, but digital.
Did you ever buy a Trump meme coin? No, I went out to dinner that night. So if I had been in front of my computer, yeah, I may have picked up a little bit. But by the time I got back, it was already worth $20, $30 billion. And, no, it already had its run. It took me a second to understand he was talking about the night Trump announced his meme coin was for sale. It was at the Crypto Ball just before Trump became president. By the time you got back from dinner that night? It was pretty clear that...
If you're selling a stock or a bond regulated by the U.S. government, you can't just secretly tip off your friends. That would be insider trading.
But meme coins aren't regulated this way. And the Trump administration has said they won't be. Do you think there's anything strange or unusual about that he's the regulator and like the chief booster and also running his own crypto business? Obviously, it's a very gray line, which obviously the president has never really shied that far away from gray lines.
if not crossing them directly, but, you know, it's the saying, it's good to be the king, right? Finally, Vice President J.D. Vance walks up to the lectern. Thank you. Thank you all.
He talks about how proud he is to be at the conference and says crypto finally has a champion in the White House. We reject the Biden administration's legacy of death by a thousand enforcement actions. And he slams the Biden official who resigned from the SEC before Trump took office. This is the guy who's taken the most punches at this conference. We reject regulators and we fired Gary Gensler and we're going to fire everybody like him.
By the end of day two, I was desperate for some perspective from outside the bubble of this conference. So I sat down on the carpeted floor of the rotunda and made a phone call to someone who has definitely not been orange-pilled. I was chief of staff for Gary Gensler, who was the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. Her name is Amanda Fisher.
So I don't speak for Gary, but I can say that he would likely welcome their disapproval because he's proud of the work at the SEC.
Amanda told me one reason crypto was a priority for Gary Gensler and the SEC was because it seems to be causing so many people so many problems. Crypto represents just 2-3% of investment assets worldwide, but it was 20% of the complaints they got from investors, she told me. Why do you think that is, that people are willing to overlook a lot of problems that this industry has had?
I think that there are a lot of people who rightly feel like work doesn't necessarily translate to wealth these days. And there is a ton of marketing around the cryptocurrency industry that promises people that if they're just clever enough, they can be rich.
Amanda told me it gets her down to see regulation and oversight dismantled. The whole point is to protect investors. The only solace I take, and this is not much because I don't want to see people get hurt, but I do think eventually this type of manic hype that is unsupported by real value cannot sustain itself.
I just hope that the bubble burns before the collateral damage is too bad.
The very last afternoon of the conference, I meet up one more time with Stephen Dale Height. We get to talking, and then we realize we need to go catch the final speakers. I know, I know, I know, I know. Are you going to go? Yes, I just want to know what it is. I'm just curious to see. For three days, the exposition hall has been so, so loud. But now it's that feeling you get before a big storm comes through, the stillness when all the air washes out.
Everyone at the entire conference is packing in to see what's going to happen on the main stage. I feel like maybe all the seats are full. Stephen and I have to sit on the floor by the wall. We're here for the last two big draws. Rockstar ovation. The first is a Bitcoin evangelist named Michael Saylor. His speech is 21 Ways to Wealth. His message?
Sell everything you have. Buy Bitcoin. You have cash flow, you buy Bitcoin. You have treasury assets, you buy Bitcoin. Sell your stocks, your bonds, your property. You have a house that doesn't have a mortgage on it? Okay, well, good for you. It's been a long three days, but Saylor absolutely captures this crowd. I look forward to seeing you next year.
After it's over, Stephen leans to me and says that 21, the number of items on Saylor's list, is a multiple of seven, which is a significant number in the Bible. I think people choose those numbers, you know? So people give seven a special significance, right? So it's kind of funny, finish on 21, not on 20, not on 22. And now it's time for the final speech of this whole event.
A tall, slender man walks on stage, beaming. Blinded by the stage lights, unable to get a word in, he paces back and forth. He waves to his supporters. Hey gang. So I'm not in a prison cell anymore. It's Ross Ulbricht, the man Trump freed from his two life sentences for running a dark web narcotics bazaar. Silk Road. Bitcoin doesn't work without freedom. Bitcoin's power comes from the fact that
that any one of us can mine if we choose to. Any one of us can send Bitcoins to anyone else. We are all on equal footing with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin, we are all free. What I hear Russ Albrecht saying to his audience is that his redemption is their redemption. Trump has brought him back to life. When I didn't know if I would ever get out from behind those thick iron bars, you even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future.
Yeah, you did that. As the speech wraps, applause ricochets through the hall. The exit music swells.
And Stephen leans over to Megan. I would have liked for him to have kind of just mentioned that, you know, what he did was wrong, kind of, you know? But maybe it wasn't the right place to say that. I don't know. I don't want to judge either. So I guess he's home. He's happy. Everybody's happy. And I think hopefully, you know, his second chance is not... I wish him well, you know? Yeah. Thank you so much, Steve. Oh, anytime. Anytime, anytime, anytime, anytime. Thank you.
The last time I checked in with Stephen, he told me he hasn't bought Bitcoin. Not yet. It's become a little too expensive. Today's episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler and fact-checked by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Marianne McKeown. It was engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
Special thanks to Meg Kramer, Amanda Wick, Tanya Kotsareva, Catherine Sullivan, and Adam Zarazinsky. I'm Andrea Bernstein. And I'm Ilya Merets. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. ♪