By George Kaloudis
Translation: Blockchain in Vernacular
Former U.S. President Donald Trump still plans to speak in person at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month, despite the injuries he sustained following an assassination attempt on Saturday. It’s a big moment for cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are now officially on the campaign trail, moving beyond casual mentions to curry favor with whatever voter groups and fundraising PACs need one day. The legitimacy the industry has craved since its inception has now materialized at a conference about Orange Coin.
I’m no political strategist, but I always find it odd that presidential candidates will campaign in states they simply can’t lose. There’s no way Trump, or any Republican candidate, can lose Tennessee in the 2024 presidential election (let’s face it, folks: Joe Biden is not Bill Clinton). Still, Trump chose to stop by Tennessee and attend a Bitcoin conference during such a busy campaign season, just as candidates do when they give campaign speeches in airplane hangars to win over military voters or canvass for blue-collar Americans in front of factories.
Despite polls and data showing that most Americans don’t use or hold cryptocurrencies — 7% of U.S. adults use or have held cryptocurrencies in 2023, according to the Federal Reserve; 28% of Republicans hold or have purchased cryptocurrencies, according to crypto investment firm Paradigm; and 52 million Americans own cryptocurrencies, according to crypto trading platform Coinbase — cryptocurrencies remain part of Trump’s reelection strategy. The Republican Party even listed cryptocurrencies as a sub-point of “supporting innovation” in its official platform marketing materials (in an unabridged, downloadable PDF version), above “artificial intelligence” and “expanding freedom, prosperity, and space security.”
The Republican Party has been trying to compete to become the pro-cryptocurrency party in the U.S. For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others have made official statements against central bank digital currencies in advance (perhaps in an effort to appear anti-China and pro-capitalist). Another example is the House of Representatives' voting effort to override President Biden's veto of a pro-cryptocurrency resolution, which ended up voting almost entirely along party lines (except for one Republican opponent and bipartisan support from 21 Democrats).
In my opinion, in this election cycle, cryptocurrency as a symbol of personal freedom has become one of the hot issues for Republican voters, so much so that Trump has completely changed his rhetoric against cryptocurrency. In 2019, Trump tweeted: "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, they are not currencies, their value is highly volatile and based on air. Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate illegal behavior, including drug trafficking and other illegal activity..." But in 2021, he called Bitcoin a scam against the US dollar in an interview with Fox Business Channel.
However, at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, he expressed support, saying, “…if you’re for crypto, you better vote for Trump.”
Clearly, there are votes to be won, and Trump wants them.
50 million voters, 100,000 votes: Things are going to get weird
We need to make a realistic and rational analysis. Let’s assume there are 50 million people who hold cryptocurrencies, as Coinbase claims. Are they all really single-issue voters? Of course not. Last year, Ryan Selkis, founder of crypto research firm Messari and a social media activist, waged a “war” against SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s anti-crypto stance in an interview with CoinDesk’s Marc Hochstein. He said that not all people who hold cryptocurrencies will vote for crypto candidates.
But candidates don’t need everyone to support crypto. As Selkis said, “Some states are won or lost by tens of thousands of votes. So you don’t need 50 million people to be single-issue voters. You just need a few hundred thousand people voting in the right areas.” He’s right. I think the 2024 US presidential election will be decided by about 100,000 votes (not ordinary votes, of course, I mean the net number of votes in key states for high votes). Therefore, if a candidate wants to win, he or she must win as many votes as possible in key areas.
Since President Biden doesn’t seem interested in addressing or courting the cryptocurrency vote (a significant misstep in my opinion, as supporting cryptocurrency doesn’t make people turn off the candidate if the position is correct), every single-issue cryptocurrency voter is likely to vote for Trump and try to influence those around them to vote for Trump as well. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that the Republican Party would see throwing their weight around the cryptocurrency issue as a valuable way to win these critical votes.
More importantly, the conference is drawing people to Tennessee from all over. Trump will not be addressing voters in Tennessee, but will be facing a diverse electorate from all over the US (dare I say, a symbol of decentralization? If only Bitcoin holders could be made to vote…). The idea is too reasonable. Cryptocurrency is now clearly firmly integrated into the mainstream. Even if cryptocurrencies are weird, American politics has always been weird. And it will continue to be weird: it will be weird to have Secret Service agents at a Bitcoin conference; it will be weird to have mainstream media (not just their finance or technology reporters) covering the conference; it will be weird when Trump once again says he wants all remaining Bitcoin to be made in the US.
I guess when things get weird, the weird people get professional.
