Jul. 30, 2024 |
Follow the bitcoin. Of everything Donald Trump could have been doing this past weekend, the former U.S. president and current Republican Party nominee traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to speak at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. Having once called Bitcoin “a scam,” Trump is now promising that, if reelected in November, he’ll make America the “crypto capital of the planet—and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.”
While Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s now-presumptive nominee, was not there, her campaign has reached out to top crypto executives to “reset” her party’s relations with them. This followed 14 Democratic members of Congress signing a letter urging their party’s leadership to be more open toward cryptocurrency, to combat what they called “a public perception” that their party “holds a negative viewpoint on digital assets.”
It’s all in stark contrast with the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden—whose chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, has called the crypto industry “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies, and money laundering.” Under Gensler, the SEC has won a string of lawsuits against crypto companies.
Why, seemingly all of a sudden, has crypto become so politically salient in the U.S.?
It’s true, there’s money in it, at a moment when money really matters. Citing OpenSecrets, The Washington Post estimates that crypto companies and investors have already donated some $121 million this election.
But there are voters in it, too—a lot of them. Upward of 52 million Americans own digital assets—Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or other kinds of digital property altogether, like music or art. Overwhelmingly, these voters are young; they’re politically motivated; and about half of them say they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who has negative views on crypto. These voters evidently believe in cryptocurrency as an asset category to help stake their futures on. But from across the speeches at Bitcoin 2024 alone, they also evidently believe in it as a crucial element of humanity’s future as a whole.
—Gustav Jönsson