LAS VEGAS—The blonde, leggy emcee with the British accent by way of Dubai keeps prodding the audience for more energy, but the audience assembled on the first day of Bitcoin 2025 this week was lackluster at best. According to the official website, 30,000 people registered for Bitcoin 2025, but they aren’t all here yet.
To access the first day’s programming, attendees had to shell out, at minimum, $1,600 for a ticket—or at least have press credentials, as People’s World does. Yet, the VIPs and professionals assembled here seem disinterested, milling about outside the main hall, on the casino floor, and schmoozing in nearby restaurants. This is no crowd of avid enthusiasts, as such gatherings once were.
The 50 attendees of the first conference, held in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, may have struggled to imagine that 14 years later, congressional representatives, senators, governors, and a sitting Vice President would one day address an audience of Bitcoiners. Yet, despite the brilliance and power assembled here this week, the vibe is that of just another Vegas trade show.
The first day was dubbed “Code + Country Day” and the emcee announced that it is sponsored by America250, a 501c(3) partner to the allegedly nonpartisan congressional U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which works alongside the Presidential Task Force to “facilitate robust public-private partnerships that bring the vision for America250 to life.”
They’re promising a year of celebration, but while this is the commission responsible for June’s military parade in DC and the official semiquincentennial celebrations in 2026, their biggest event so far seems to be Bitcoin 2025 here in Las Vegas.
Perhaps this theme, so close to the U.S. government, is one of the reasons why the audience of enthusiasts was rather sparse on day one. Bitcoin was created in 2009 as a way to circumvent the regulatory mechanisms of the state.
Conjured up by an anonymous creator angered by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailouts, it was supposed to “fix the world” by creating a currency that would be limited in number—21 million, to be precise—to prevent inflation, and that could easily slip past regulators and totalitarian governments alike.
Initially, Bitcoin held an unsavory reputation, thanks to it being used as a medium of exchange on the ”Dark Web” to buy guns, drugs, and people. Ross Ulbricht, one of the mascots of the Bitcoin community, spent just over a decade in prison for running such a concern, called The Silk Road.
Sentenced to two life sentences without parole, and 144,000 bitcoin seized by the government, he addressed previous bitcoin conferences via calls from federal prison. Yet, on the first full day of Trump’s second term earlier this year, he was granted a full and unconditional pardon.
Ironically, Ulbricht does not get his bitcoin back—the government auctioned it off for nearly $50 million. Today, that same amount of bitcoin would be worth more than $15 billion.
What price for freedom?
But who can put a price on freedom? Ulbricht, a stalwart crypto libertarian, is free, and the MAGAfied party that freed him now occupies all three branches of government. They are, by definition, the establishment.
Whereas the concept of a libertarian, anti-state digital currency replacing the whole of the global monetary system may have once relegated the constituency to the political margins, the MAGA movement has wholeheartedly embraced the movement, or, at least, its money. It’s clear that the Trump administration does not embrace the cyberpunk flavor of free market economics underwriting bitcoin’s hyperdeflationary ambitions.
His ongoing tariffs saga and market manipulations have been accused by some of being akin to central planning. His administration’s promise to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve that can hedge against the U.S. dollar seems a stretch of Bitcoin’s anti-establishment principles.
Bitcoin hit the big time once politicians started accepting it to finance their campaigns. Even if they weren’t accepting Bitcoin outright, there’s enough money sloshing around “the space” (what crypto enthusiasts call their community and its ecosystem) that politicians from Eric Adams to Donald Trump started to accept invitations to speak at events years ago.
Day one of the Bitcoin conference is nearly overrun with politicians – even Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem delivered a four-minute video address.
Much of the discussion from the main stage focused on how the Trump administration plans on funding what one of his Executive Orders titled the “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and how to push Bitcoin-friendly bills, such as the GENIUS Act, through the legislative branch. Of all the elected officials, Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming is by far the most familiar face at this conference, having pegged herself as a loyal Bitcoin fan for years at this event.
Others, like junior Sen. Jim Justice, the richest man in West Virginia, who appears with his dog on stage, are clearly new to the space. However, with the total number of government officials standing at 14 (16 if you count Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump Jr.), the volume alone sets a record, with even more to come in the days to follow.
The Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, was set to open the second day of the conference. This is, by far, the most powerful person in the world to address the Bitcoin conference—a long road traveled since the Roosevelt Hotel conference in 2011.
What has motivated this coterie of elected officials to Las Vegas this week? Given the plausible deniability built into the Bitcoin protocol itself, it would be hard to know for certain… but it’s safe to say that it’s probably money.
It’s hard to say how much the politicians at Bitcoin 2025 have accepted from the industry outright, but their hamming it up for an underwhelmed and at times somewhat sparse audience means that the Bitcoin space commands that sort of respect.
But on what basis—the libertarian ethos that spawned the movement, or the Blackrock and MAGA-sponsored corporate culture that is increasingly finding new ways to ultimately profit from it, does it continue? Just outside of the main stage, recently freed Ross Ulbricht, described as a “freedom fighter” in the official program, auctioned off his prison memorabilia —some ID cards, a few paintings, even his sneakers—for Bitcoin. As of the end of the first day, most of the items are bidding in the low thousands. His djembe drum, sleeping bag, and Vibram 5-finger shoes are going for just a couple hundred dollars.
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