When Trump met crypto

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Speaker 1 This is Planet Money from NPR.

Speaker 3 Back at the end of May, I I went to a bar in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Speaker 4 Hi, pleasure to meet you.

Speaker 2 Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Speaker 5 It's a Bitcoin bar where you can buy an actual beer with virtual currency.

Speaker 4 This is a dive bar.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it looks really nice.

Speaker 4 I would say we're a luxury dive bar. So, you know, dive bars are approachable places for everybody, you know?

Speaker 3 The first person they meet is a guy named Mike Germano. He's one of the people that runs this place.

Speaker 3 It's called Hubkey, and it's not normally open for lunch, but it is today because so many people are here.

Speaker 4 We're at a little extra special Italian back there because it's Pizza Day, the most important holiday in the Bitcoin calendar.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There are stacks of pizza boxes in the back room where people are eating, and I can smell the pies.

Speaker 6 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 way station on a journey to a much bigger gathering.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 3 And appropriately for a pilgrimage, there's a shrine.

Speaker 4 You know, if you walk into the right there is kind of our shrine to all the Bitcoin culture.

Speaker 3 Over here? Yeah. Okay, so what are we looking at?

Speaker 4 So once again, here's our shrine.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 I like the nesting dolls.

Speaker 3 Right in the center of the display, there are brightly painted Russian dolls.

Speaker 4 That happened to have all the people gone to jail for fraud in the crypto world.

Speaker 4 So you might remember the largest one there. That was the founder of FTX.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 11 Then it's Alex Mashinsky from Celsius and the little one there that kicked it all off.

Speaker 6 In this bar and in the Bitcoin world and crypto in general, outlaws can be heroes.

Speaker 11 The Terra Luna disaster.

Speaker 3 Bitcoiners have long seen themselves as a liberation force and they think governments and banks are in their way.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 While we're standing right here where it took place next to the Bitcoin shrine, can you describe like what happened?

Speaker 11 When President Trump visited?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so...

Speaker 3 The other guy who runs the bar jumps in. His name is Thomas Pacquiao.

Speaker 11 President Trump bought 50 burgers and 50 Diet Cokes and he used Bitcoin to facilitate the transaction.

Speaker 3 Right here, right where we are, where you're sitting.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 9 It was a surreal day.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Out on the street, before I leave PubKey, Mike introduces me to Frank Corva.

Speaker 4 He's actually the best journalist in the space

Speaker 9 and covers the White House.

Speaker 2 So this is the exact person.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He'll also be on the pilgrimage to Vegas, where he'll be live streaming the conference.

Speaker 3 And with just a few days to go, he's thinking about how this year will be so different from all the previous ones.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Commerce Commerce Secretary, to one of the most famous crypto outlaws, newly freed by Trump. All of them headed for Vegas.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So we sent them to the Venetian resort to join these thousands of pilgrims traveling to Las Vegas to hear from their newest leaders.

Speaker 3 What What happens when the President of the United States showers his love on the crypto community while becoming a crypto entrepreneur himself?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 Plus, the inside story of Trump's love affair with crypto.

Speaker 12 What we saw in Vegas is not going to stay in Vegas.

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Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Orange neckties, orange suits, orange bikini tops.

Speaker 2 Orange, it turns out, is the color of Bitcoin.

Speaker 12 People who go all in on Bitcoin talk about getting orange pill.

Speaker 2 Then there is another thing we notice.

Speaker 12 I see all this like

Speaker 2 kind of crypto-related art on the right.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I'm standing near some pictures of world currencies on fire when I meet a guy named Magid Zafer.

Speaker 16 Did you see the Ross Albright auctions?

Speaker 2 No. Those are really cool.

Speaker 16 He was the founder of Silk Road.

Speaker 12 This is the thing I'm still thinking about. An art auction to raise money for Ross Ulbricht.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 It was called Silk Road, and the whole thing ran on Bitcoin.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 Ulbricht was separately charged with attempted witness murder. That case was dropped after his two life sentences were upheld in the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Ross Ulbricht, freedom fighter, right next to J.D. Vance, vice president.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And my new buddy Magid is telling me he's willing to overlook Ulbricht's crimes.

Speaker 16 I mean, if you think about most people that freed any revolution, right, most of them spent some time in jail.

Speaker 12 You don't have any misgivings? I mean, he got two life sentences.

Speaker 16 You know, here, there's good and bad for anyone that's done anything big, right?

Speaker 12 For Magid, it's about what Ulbricht did for Bitcoin. He showed how it could work in a real marketplace.

Speaker 16 He was

Speaker 16 one of the first people to really bring commercial legitimacy to the technology.

Speaker 12 We went back to the Ulbricht Wall a few times, and no one we talked to objected to this convicted criminal being celebrated.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 There are all kinds of people at this conference, families with strollers, high-end executives, influencers, people who are just getting interested.

Speaker 3 Some of them because of President Trump's enthusiasm. Like Stephen Daleheit.
He's a lawyer from San Antonio, 61, tall, goes by Esteban sometimes because he spent so much of his life in Mexico.

Speaker 3 He's been watching Bitcoin for a while.

Speaker 18 My wife is into it big time.

Speaker 8 She's been talking about it for years now.

Speaker 13 And I'm the one that's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 I mean, that's just like pie in the sky.

Speaker 3 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 gonna go up but it's like I did my research I got the crypto app

Speaker 12 and then I got stuck with the whole wallet thing for whatever reason you know I'm like it is a well-known and long-standing 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.

Speaker 18 I could have bought one at, you know, 60 some odd thousand, almost 70,000.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 18 Was actually advertising this conference and I just said, what the heck?

Speaker 8 And I'm like, I'm just going to go over there and get into it.

Speaker 12 How long ago was this?

Speaker 8 This? This was two days ago.

Speaker 12 That you made this decision. Yeah,

Speaker 8 just overnight.

Speaker 4 Incredible.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just like that.

Speaker 12 So he's been here, not even one whole day. And I hear him becoming convinced Bitcoin is on the rise.

Speaker 8 I mean, the whole thing, because it's not really just a currency, it's a movement. And it's an ideology as well.

Speaker 12 Talking with Steven, 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 2 President could draw in a lot more people.

Speaker 12 If Trump had lost the election,

Speaker 12 would you be getting into Bitcoin?

Speaker 8 That's a really hard question.

Speaker 12 We say our goodbyes for now.

Speaker 5 Could I follow up with you later, though?

Speaker 12 How can I find you?

Speaker 19 Welcome everyone to the Bitcoin magazine news desk presented by Mara at Bitcoin Bitcoin 2025.

Speaker 3 The marquee speeches of the conference were all taking place on the main stage.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 Of course, the new guy from the Washington Press Corps was there at the anchor desk, right outside the door.

Speaker 3 Frank had wondered back at the Bitcoin bar what it would mean for Bitcoin to get such a firm embrace from the establishment.

Speaker 3 During a break in his anchoring duties, he said, now that we're here, the hug seemed even tighter than he'd expected.

Speaker 2 A lot of politicians are here.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 Over the next three days, the conversations Frank and Stephen from Texas and all of us heard on stage were surprisingly unguarded.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 2 We were later.

Speaker 10 We were, you know, real estate guys. We were hard assets.
We built buildings.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 He said their value was based on thin air and that unregulated crypto assets could facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 complained bitterly about how mistreated and censored the family felt.

Speaker 10 We're getting debanked. We're getting de-insured.
We're getting de-everything.

Speaker 12 The Trumps never lost access to banking entirely, but still, crypto seemed so inviting. When did you get orange-pilled?

Speaker 10 Honestly, during that same period of time, I mean, I think there's so many natural ties between free speech, crypto, Bitcoin.

Speaker 3 The sons were in.

Speaker 3 But their father

Speaker 3 not yet.

Speaker 12 Did you orange pill your dad?

Speaker 10 Well, you know, I think, honestly, between, you know, my brother and I, you know, probably definitely, you know, did some of that into the.

Speaker 3 According to the story unfolding at the conference, the relationship between Donald Trump himself and crypto didn't really blossom until a year ago.

Speaker 3 Trump had just been convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, which he's still challenging.

Speaker 20 It was right on the heels of that whole sham trial that they put the president through.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Sachs said it was at a fundraising dinner he held in San Francisco for Trump.

Speaker 20 This was June 6th of last year. I remember that date because that happens to be D-Day.

Speaker 12 Sack 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.

Speaker 20 And no one knew exactly how he would be received.

Speaker 12 But at this very nice dinner in San Francisco, there was a spark.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The crypto world hates Gensler for what they see as years of regulatory overreach.

Speaker 3 And in Sachs's 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.

Speaker 20 And so I think he really understood the plight of

Speaker 20 the crypto community because they were being subjected to the same kind of unfair persecution that he was.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 On stage at the Bitcoin conference, we also heard a parallel story, a really important one that I hadn't quite understood before.

Speaker 3 Basically, at this moment that Donald Trump started courting crypto votes on the campaign trail, he and his sons were starting crypto businesses.

Speaker 12 And at first, as Don Jr.

Speaker 2 told it, there was a lot to figure out.

Speaker 12 I'm a late-ish adapter, and when I'm calling my friends who've been doing it forever, like, okay, how do I do this again so I don't send someone a fairly large piece of money and don't get get it wrong you know 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 stablecoin 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.

Speaker 3 billion dollars from investors to buy Bitcoin.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 And, you know, the fake news was going to fake their up.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 in the White House state dining room.

Speaker 3 All of these moves have been very, very good for this crowd. And they've been good for the Trump family.

Speaker 12 We asked the White House about this, and they sent a statement. President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world and revolutionizing our digital financial technology.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 So, that's how Trump is profiting from crypto. When we return, how the crypto industry is profiting from Trump

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Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 By day two, I start to suspect everyone has swallowed the orange pill.

Speaker 12 Stephen, 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.

Speaker 21 What's his name? The Italian guy who's the owner of Tether?

Speaker 21 Never seen him before. I'd never heard about him before.
I'd kind of just heard the word Tether. It was really interesting for me to listen to him.

Speaker 3 Paolo Arduino is the CEO of Tether, and he spoke about bringing crypto to the masses around the world.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 3 Tether makes a particular kind of digital currency called stable coins. Unlike Bitcoin, stable coins are tied to the value of something more conventional, like the US dollar.

Speaker 17 We started to realize that money is the ultimate social network. I think Bitcoin is actually the ultimate social network.

Speaker 2 When Paolo wasn't on stage, he found a quiet hallway to talk with me.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 22 Vegas, I'm a sea is too bit too

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Paolo told me he had never once been to the U.S. until this past March.

Speaker 22 Actually, this year in 2025 was the first year I came to the United States.

Speaker 12 And he started big. On March 6th, he posted an image from his visit to the White House and another from outside the Capitol.

Speaker 22 We have some good conversations with the Trump administration. never met the president himself.

Speaker 22 We have good conversations with lawmakers on the Senate and representatives of the House.

Speaker 12 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 USD-1.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The company says it's now working on these issues with U.S. law enforcement.

Speaker 12 So Tether has connections in Washington. Another one is through the company's financial partner, Cantor Fitzgerald.

Speaker 12 When they first started working together, Cantor's chairman was Howard Luttnick, and he is now Trump's commerce secretary. Paolo says he and Howard don't talk anymore.

Speaker 22 There could be a conflict of interest.

Speaker 3 But on stage at the conference, Paolo appeared with another Luttnick.

Speaker 17 I'm joined here by my friend, Brendan, the new chairman of Counter Fitzgerald at 27.

Speaker 17 Tell us all about that.

Speaker 3 Howard's son, Brandon Luttnick, took over for his dad as the bank's chairman.

Speaker 15 It's

Speaker 20 really a blessing to be here, especially on stage with you, Paolo.

Speaker 15 You know, you and I have really had a blossoming friendship.

Speaker 3 He's wearing a well-fitted suit and bookish glasses.

Speaker 15 I owe a lot to you and the whole Tether team, really orange-pilling me.

Speaker 12 So that's the talk that impressed Stephen Daleheit. He told me, after watching Paolo, he sees how useful stable coins like Tether can be, both abroad and right here at home.

Speaker 1 That blew my mind, right?

Speaker 2 And that is all Paolo.

Speaker 5 Here's the thing, though.

Speaker 2 Tether's coins are not dollars.

Speaker 12 They're not backed by the U.S. government.
But with so many friends in high places, you could get that impression.

Speaker 3 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 who loses because they're all here to try to win.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 You're sitting next to me, I'm going to interview you. That's my payment.
Yeah, that's your payment. His name is Will.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Did you ever buy a Trump meme coin?

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 no, it already had its run.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 By the time he got back from dinner that night.

Speaker 24 It was pretty clear that some people were set up to make quite a bit on that.

Speaker 24 It's almost most meme coins are actually set up like that.

Speaker 24 The insiders that have the ability to

Speaker 24 see and pump it themselves are going to make the most, which is fine, whatever.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But meme coins aren't 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?

Speaker 3 He's the regulator and like the chief booster and

Speaker 3 also running his own crypto business.

Speaker 24 Obviously, it's a very gray line, which obviously this president has never really shied that far away from gray lines,

Speaker 24 if not crossing them directly. But

Speaker 2 I know

Speaker 24 it's the saying, it's good to be the king, right?

Speaker 3 Finally, Vice President J.D. Vance walks up with a lecture.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Thank you all.

Speaker 5 First of all, I want to...

Speaker 12 He talks about how proud he is to be at the conference and says crypto finally has a champion in the White House.

Speaker 9 We reject the Biden administration's legacy of death by a thousand enforcement actions.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 4 We reject regulators and we fired Gary Gensler and we're going to fire everybody like him.

Speaker 12 By the end of day two, I was desperate for some perspective from outside the bubble of this conference.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 25 I was chief of staff for Gary Gensler, who was the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration.

Speaker 12 Her name is Amanda Fisher.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Crypto represents just 2% to 3% of investment assets worldwide, but it was 20% of the complaints they got from investors, she told me.

Speaker 6 Why do you think that is, that people are willing to

Speaker 17 overlook a lot of problems that this industry has had?

Speaker 25 I think that there are a lot of people who

Speaker 25 rightly feel like work doesn't necessarily translate to wealth these days.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 manic hype that is unsupported by real value cannot sustain itself.

Speaker 25 I just hope that the bubble bursts before the collateral damage is too bad.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 12 I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.

Speaker 18 Yes, I just want to know what is...

Speaker 21 Yeah, I'm just curious to see.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We're here for the last two big draws.

Speaker 19 Rockstar ovation.

Speaker 12 The first is a Bitcoin evangelist named Michael Saylor. His speech is 21 Ways to Wealth.
His message? Sell everything everything you have.

Speaker 2 Buy Bitcoin.

Speaker 19 You have cash flow, you buy Bitcoin. You have treasury assets, you buy Bitcoin.

Speaker 2 Sell your stocks, your bonds, your property.

Speaker 19 You have a house that doesn't have a mortgage on it. Okay, well, good for you.

Speaker 3 It's been a long three days, but Sailor absolutely captures this crowd.

Speaker 19 And I look forward to seeing you next year.

Speaker 3 After it's over, Stephen leans to me and says that 21, the number of items on Sailor's list, is a multiple of seven, which is a significant number in the Bible.

Speaker 13 I think people choose those numbers, you know?

Speaker 8 So people give seven a special significance, right?

Speaker 18 So kind of funny, finish on 21, not on 20, not on 22.

Speaker 12 And now, it's time for the final speech of this whole event.

Speaker 12 A tall, slender man walks on stage.

Speaker 2 beaming.

Speaker 12 Blinded by the stage lights, unable to get a word in, he paces back and forth. He waves to his supporters.

Speaker 17 Hey gang.

Speaker 12 So I'm not in a prison cell anymore.

Speaker 3 It's Ross Albrecht, the man Trump freed from his two life sentences for running a dark web narcotics bazaar. Silk Road.

Speaker 2 Bitcoin doesn't work without freedom.

Speaker 23 Bitcoin's power comes from the fact that any one of us can mine if we choose to.

Speaker 23 Any one of us can send bitcoins to anyone else.

Speaker 2 We are all on equal footing with Bitcoin.

Speaker 2 With Bitcoin, we are all free.

Speaker 3 What I hear Russ Albrick saying to his audience

Speaker 3 is that his redemption is their redemption. Trump has brought him back to life.

Speaker 23 When I didn't know if I would ever get out from behind those thick iron bars,

Speaker 23 You even got President Trump to see that Bitcoin is the future.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 23 you did that.

Speaker 3 As the speech wraps, applause ricochets through the hall. The exit music swells.
And Stephen leans over to me again.

Speaker 7 I would have liked for him to have kind of just mentioned that, you know, what he did was wrong, kind of, you know.

Speaker 7 But maybe it wasn't the right place to say that. I don't know.
I don't want to judge either.

Speaker 18 So I guess he's home. He's happy.
Everybody's happy.

Speaker 7 And I think hopefully, you know,

Speaker 8 his second chance is not wasteed.

Speaker 7 I wish him well, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much, Steven.

Speaker 2 Oh, anytime.

Speaker 7 Anytime, anytime, anytime, anytime.

Speaker 12 The last time I checked in with Steven, he told me he hasn't bought Bitcoin. Not yet.

Speaker 17 It's become a little too expensive.

Speaker 12 Today's episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and fact-checked by Lilla Rubin.

Speaker 17 It was edited by Marianne McCune.

Speaker 12 It was engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to May Kramer, Amanda Wick, Tanya Kotsareva, Catherine Sullivan, and Adam Zarazinski. I'm Andrea Bernstein.

Speaker 12 And I'm Ilya Meritz.

Speaker 17 This is NPR.

Speaker 12 Thanks for listening.

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