Cash News
In late August, Donald Trump released an ad for the fourth series of Trump-themed digital playing cards. “These cards show me dancing and even me holding some bitcoins,” the former President says, referring to the most popular cryptocurrency. If you buy fifteen or more digital cards—at ninety-nine dollars apiece—you’ll get one “beautiful physical trading card,” he adds, with “an authentic piece of my suit that I wore for the Presidential debate” in June, against Joe Biden. Buying seventy-five cards earns you a dinner with Trump in Jupiter, Florida. The pitch was in keeping with Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Wine, and Trump’s other fly-by-night merchandising ventures. But the reference to bitcoin, and another claim in the ad—“you know, they call me the crypto President”—signalled his attempt to court a new kind of voter. After calling bitcoin “a scam,” in 2021, the former President has done a one-eighty; last week, he announced the launch of a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. According to its white paper, Trump’s eighteen-year-old son, Barron, is the project’s “DeFi visionary” (“DeFi,” or decentralized finance, is a branch of the crypto industry that offers financial services); another executive is the former head of a company called Date Hotter Girls. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said, offering few further details. The announcement came after he attended a bitcoin conference in Nashville, earlier this summer, where he announced his intention to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and make America the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Even Kamala Harris is getting in on the game. On Sunday, at a fund-raiser on Wall Street, she told attendees that she would use her Presidency to “encourage innovative technologies” like “digital assets”—her first reference to crypto since embarking on the campaign trail. Still, it’s unclear whether crypto enthusiasts really represent a significant untapped voting bloc. Cryptocurrency is notably—and, to many of its fans, attractively—pseudonymous, making it hard to gauge the total number of people who own it. In 2023, the Federal Reserve estimated that there are roughly eighteen million crypto users in the United States. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump adviser turned Trump critic, who runs a hedge fund, has put the number at eighty-five million. (“You have more crypto owners than you have dog owners,” he said, earlier this year.) Only a small number of these people appear to be using crypto as a medium of exchange, given its dramatic fluctuations in value. Many seem to treat it as a stock.
What is clear, though, is that crypto is a trillion-dollar industry that the government has been increasingly interested in regulating. In 2023, U.S. lawmakers proposed a regulatory framework for it, and this could have significant financial repercussions. Crypto companies have reportedly poured more than a hundred and nineteen million dollars into the current Presidential campaign. Lately, several companies have also published research arguing that crypto users’ votes can be swayed by candidates’ stances on the technology. In early September, Gemini, a crypto exchange, published a report saying that nearly three-quarters of crypto owners in the U.S. “plan to consider a candidate’s policies toward digital assets” in November. Grayscale, a publicly traded bitcoin fund, put out a report of its own on the 2024 election, in which it claims that “nearly half of voters (47%) now expect some of their investment portfolio to include crypto.”
The Grayscale report also states that, while crypto is probably owned by roughly the same number of Democrats as Republicans, crypto-adjacent issues, like inflation, “seem to be valued relatively more by Republicans.” Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who has studied cryptocurrency users, told me that there is limited academic research on crypto-related questions, but he echoed this general characterization. “Some crypto owners are quite skeptical of the political establishment—that’s why they’re buying crypto in the first place—and Trump is sort of the candidate for that voter,” Uscinski said. “He exudes their skepticism of the system writ large.” But he speculated that there are also “plenty of people who own crypto who are not gonna vote for Trump.”
Recently, I attended a crypto meetup near Atlanta titled “Bitcoin Enters the Mainstream Political Arena.” It was organized by Rich Clarke, a real-estate agent in his early forties. Clarke runs Bitcoin Atlanta, a group with a few thousand members. This was Clarke’s first event dedicated to the intersection of cryptocurrency and politics, which, he said, “has always been a touchy subject.” Most crypto enthusiasts have historically been “apathetic to or disillusioned by politics,” he said. Bitcoin, in particular, has long been attached to a pseudo-philosophy of “financial sovereignty,” and its proponents tend to be vocal about what they perceive to be government overreach, in the forms of regulation, censorship, and central banking. Clarke’s interest in crypto began in 2012, after twice supporting Ron Paul for President. “What I walked away with is that operating within the existing system is not gonna get us anywhere,” Clarke told me. “We’ll have to make a new system or a parallel system. I don’t know.” He went on, “At that same time, bitcoin was gaining notoriety. So I was, like, Here’s something I can work on to help lay a new set of tracks.”
In late 2020, Clarke, who had worked as an audio engineer in the past, opened a cryptop-consulting business, which never took off. In the early days of his interest, he mined some bitcoin. “Having been involved in crypto for as long as I have, people assume I’m a multimillionaire,” he told me. “Truth is, I’ve gambled most of it away. I was irresponsible. But being divorced from the financial aspect has helped me see things more clearly.” Since immersing himself in crypto, Clarke has voted in Presidential elections, “but only begrudgingly”—until this cycle. He was an alternate Trump delegate to the G.O.P. Convention in July, in part because of Trump’s embrace of crypto. “It’s one issue, but it touches other issues,” he said. Clarke thinks that making bitcoin, instead of the U.S. dollar, the world’s reserve currency could encourage peace. “Since World War One, all U.S. wars are funded largely via inflation,” he argued. “Bitcoin has no central issuer and a fixed supply, so such funding mechanisms would be largely unavailable.” Clarke doesn’t expect Trump to necessarily accomplish this, but, he said, “he can give the technology more room to breathe.”
I asked Clarke whether he knew people for whom Trump’s recent support for cryptocurrency would earn him their vote. He related the story of a friend in his thirties who had never voted before but resolved to do so this year, after Trump said that he would pardon Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, an online black market that, before it was shut down, facilitated an untold number of illegal transactions through bitcoin, giving the currency one of its first major use cases. In 2015, he received two life sentences without the possibility of parole, for crimes related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. “He’s a folk hero to our community,” Clarke went on. I asked whether he trusted Trump to follow through on his promises. “If you’re trying to weigh voting for somebody who said unambiguously that he likes crypto and that he’d pardon Ross versus somebody who is completely radio-silent on the issue, I think you have to go with the former option—whether he’s lying or not.”
The meetup began on the patio of a co-working space in Chamblee, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. In mid-August, Clarke’s plan had been to stage a debate between representatives of the three most prominent Presidential candidates, but they couldn’t find anyone to represent Vice-President Kamala Harris, and then Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., suspended his campaign. Clarke figured the attendees that day would be mostly right-leaning and male. “When a woman comes to your crypto meetup,” he said, “it’s, like, ‘Hey! What’s up!’ ”
Crypto enthusiasts are aware of the stereotypes that cling to them. “We’re used to being portrayed as crazy, fringe weirdos,” Clarke told me. In July, the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One published a paper titled “The Political, Psychological, and Social Correlates of Cryptocurrency Ownership,” which gave an academic imprimatur to some of these perceptions. The paper, co-authored by Uscinski and based on a 2022 survey of two thousand Americans, made the rounds in the crypto world. Clarke read to me from the abstract; individuals who own crypto, it said, “exhibit a diversity of political allegiances and identities. We also found that crypto ownership was associated with belief in conspiracy theories, ‘dark’ personality characteristics (e.g., the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism), and more frequent use of alternative and fringe social media platforms.” Many in the community feel that social networks like X are legitimate news sources. The paper reported that crypto owners tend to spend a lot of time online, one of its few findings with which Clarke agreed. “It’s obviously completely biased,” he eventually concluded. “But you can judge for yourself whether you think crypto people have a tendency towards these ‘dark traits’ or whatever.”
There was free barbecue at the meetup, and around thirty people were enjoying it when I arrived. Most were male, as anticipated, and bearded. Many were quite friendly. The first person I spoke to at length was Joey, a theatre director in his sixties, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “SINGLE,” “TAKEN,” and “HODLING.” Each word had a box beside it. The “HODLING” box was checked: a bitcoin joke. (“HODL” is an acronym for “hold on for dear life,” a bunker-mentality acknowledgment of crypto’s volatility.) As we sat down to eat some brisket, with Counting Crows blaring in the background, Joey told me that he’d learned about cryptocurrency more than a decade earlier, from his son, who was mining it in their basement. Joey was drawn to “the philosophy around it—the whole concept of how it potentially has the ability for us to have a space to store money without it losing value as our country continues to print money.” I asked about Trump. “He follows what Kennedy thinks,” Joey said, noting his preference for the latter. (Kennedy, who disclosed owning as much as a quarter million dollars’ worth of bitcoin last year, described falling “in love” with it during an interview at the North American Blockchain Summit, last November. “It’s democracy,” he said.) “So is it really the truth? It might be.” He went on, “Trump used to not like bitcoin, now he does. Biden didn’t like it. Maybe he would have changed? Harris doesn’t really have a voice about it yet.” With Kennedy out of the race, Joey was undecided.
I bumped into Kamil, a thirty-five-year-old mechatronics engineer born in Poland, who became a U.S. citizen in the late nineties, and has been involved in crypto trading since 2011. He’d once owned hundreds of bitcoins, but, he said, “I was a poor college kid with free magic Internet money, so I was definitely dipping in.” Crypto aligned with Kamil’s belief in “economic freedom.” He’d voted Republican since his first election, in 2016, largely because of crypto policy. “The opposition was heavily against crypto in every way. They wanted to monitor it, restrict it, tax it. So that was an automatic no.” Trump’s new support thrilled him, but he doubted that many crypto enthusiasts who weren’t already voting Republican would switch parties. “I hope Trump’s embrace moves people, but I haven’t seen people change their vote yet. Even people who’d heavily benefit.”