Bitcoin bros’ mistrust of government comes out at Las Vegas conference

“Make America Great Again” hats and crypto-themed variations of the slogan were everywhere among the 30,000 attendees at last week’s Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

One booth featured a life-sized cutout of President Donald Trump, bloodied from an assassination attempt — but instead of raising his fist in defiance, he gripped a physical bitcoin.

And each time Vice President JD Vance discussed a new Trump administration policy during his keynote address, the audience erupted in barely contained excitement.

The scenes suggested Trump and the Republican Party had successfully courted the cryptocurrency community, whose advocates poured over $200 million into the 2024 presidential election and are already witnessing returns on their political investment.

Gary Gensler, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chair who garnered widespread animosity from the cryptocurrency community for the agency’s increased enforcement, stepped down in January. And to end “regulation by prosecution,” the Department of Justice shut down its cryptocurrency enforcement team in April.

But not everyone walking the halls of the Venetian Convention and Expo Center last week was pleased to see so many Republican politicians — like U.S. Sens. Jim Justice of West Virginia and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming — taking center stage. At the conference, bitcoin’s antiestablishment origins clashed with the reality that the cryptocurrency had become part of the very system it once opposed.

Erik Cason, author of the book “Cryptosovereignty” and a self-described “crypto-anarchist,” took a hit of his vape on the conference’s secondary stage hours after Vance finished speaking. The panel’s moderator had asked him what he thought of “the state.”

“Bitcoin works without the state,” he said to the around 100 attendees intently listening. “You can own bitcoin today and exit from this … establishment that’s designed to steal from you and redistribute that money towards war and horror.”

That wasn’t a unique opinion among his fellow panelists.

An “OG Bitcoiner” on the community’s podcast circuit who goes by American HODL said there’s a real risk that bitcoin could lose its status as “freedom money” the more it cozies up to the government. And Bruce Fenton, a New Hampshirite bitcoin investor with 125,000 followers on X, said politicians “need us more than we need them.”

“We live in a state-worshiping society and you hear people, even at events like this, like ‘Oh boy! The undersecretary of this and this elected official is here!’ Who cares?” Fenton asked the crowd. “We should refuse meetings with them. We do not need these people.”

Garret “GMoney,” who keeps his last name a secret while hosting a bitcoin podcast on the video platform Rumble, came to a more radical position that culminated in a panel he hosted Tuesday titled “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776.”

To start a revolution, he wants people to stop paying federal income taxes.

“I’m not saying we burn it down. We don’t have to burn anything down. What we’re saying is we’re going to transition, but we’re … not going to ask for your permission anymore,” GMoney told the Sun.

“We need to go back to maybe a GoFundMe … government. You want to do this? Well, why don’t you see how many people are willing to fund it? You want to send bombs to other countries on our dollar?” he continued. “Let’s see how many people actually support your efforts.”

The community’s distrust of governments goes back to how the technology behind bitcoin works, said Nico Moran, host of the daily YouTube show “Simply Bitcoin.”

The original whitepaper for bitcoin set out to create a transaction system between two people that didn’t need a trusted third party and Moran said one of the selling points is being able to use money the government can’t access.

Moran added that, historically, the community has been less interested in politics, though that changed under President Joe Biden. Bitcoiners were forced to throw their hat into the ring due to aggressive enforcement under Biden’s tenure, he said.

And despite Trump delivering on his pro-crypto promises, Moran said most of the community does not like the industry cozying up to government officials. Even still, sometimes you have to “play the game,” he said.

“If you’re not in the room, you’re not in the deal. We were not in the room in D.C. for a very long time. We’re in the room now,” Moran said. “I think bitcoin’s core is incorruptible. I think it’s always going to have this ‘leave me .. alone’ type of mentality.”

But the proudly counterculture Bitcoiners walking around the Venetian have baggage of their own that may limit their ability to go mainstream.

Fenton, who helped distribute ventilators during the pandemic, posted on social media that no one who declined COVID-19 vaccination had regretted their decision — a claim that drew criticism from some commenters.

Meanwhile, GMoney sees deep connections between Trump, bitcoin and QAnon conspiracy theories. QAnon centers around anonymous posts claiming the world is run by a Satanic cabal made up of high-level Democrats and other elites that Trump would arrest, though GMoney did add that some posts had misinformation within them.

His journey toward QAnon started at the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting on the Strip. It wasn’t his first time attending the festival, and he doesn’t buy that only one shooter killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others that night. Metro’s final report on the shooting determined that there was only one gunman.

“I don’t trust the narrative that was put out. But maybe the narrative was put out to avoid some kind of internal civil war,” he said. “I’ve just kind of chalked (it up to it) being now a necessary cover-up to instill the direction of this plan that Trump and the patriots had.”

And what does he say to the people who find his QAnon theories, which largely deal with connecting numbers and letters to find patterns, too out there?

“I don’t really try to convince people of it anymore,” he said. “But what I would say is if you just kind of take the mathematical coincidences and cross reference some of that stuff, you can easily see that there was something going on.”

Trojan horse, Orange Party or both?

Cason reminded those listening to him Wednesday that Vance and many of the officials who came to the Venetian were there because of the bitcoin community’s donations, not the other way around.

And it wasn’t just for Republicans. One crypto political action committee during the 2024 cycle spent nearly $2 million on ads to support U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., though the ads didn’t cover crypto policy, CNBC reported.

Stand With Crypto, an advocacy group that also grades legislators on their crypto voting record, had 16,000 people in Nevada to “be advocates for the group,” according to CNBC.

“We literally swung the last presidential election,” Cason said. “You have a number of people from the administration coming here to pander (to) us. Guys, get off your … knees. It’s time to stand up and become our own political contingency,” he told those listening at the side stage.

Those at the 1776 panel and the other panel Cason attended, “Are Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state?”, discussed a few options for advancing their political power without losing crypto’s soul.

One, which is arguably similar to what the industry is already doing, is to get elected officials and government entities to start using the cryptocurrency so their incentives inevitably align with that of Bitcoiners. Panelist Casey Rodarmor referred to that method as being a “Trojan horse.”

Rodarmor, who developed a system to store images on bitcoin’s open ledger, said he would be apprehensive to donate directly to politicians. But if he did, he would want to force them into holding bitcoin “for longer periods of time.”

“The same way that power corrupts, money can corrupt,” Rodarmor said, “and maybe we can use that to our own ends.”

Steven London, who ran an unsuccessful campaign in the 2024 Republican primary to oust U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., takes the Trojan Horse to the next level. The only politician with his own booth at the Bitcoin conference, he’s running for the district again with a platform that’s largely bitcoin-focused.

London believes the United States’ debt is going to soon catch up to the country and help kill the dollar, sending the country into an economic downtown “worse than the Great Depression.” According to London, Bitcoin will be the saving grace if the country speeds up its adoption of the technology.

“There’s going to be a global economic collapse. We’re going to go from nobody understanding bitcoin to everybody understanding,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the mess with everybody else. We want to lead the way.”

And while Democrats were the butt of many jokes at the conference, Cason doesn’t like Republicans either. That’s why he consistently advocated for an “Orange Party” to compete against the two-party system.

“It’s time to elect people that … say, ‘I’m not going to compromise myself with either the red side or the blue side because they’re both just as criminal as the last administration,’ ” he said. “It’s time to do something new, something radical and something profound.”

Cason said he believes bitcoin is entering a dangerous period with the industry getting so close to government officials. Bitcoiners establishing their own party is the only way to maintain “a radical, truly third-party political idea.”

“We should have our own party,” American HODL said, agreeing with Cason. “We shouldn’t be beholden to this bipartisan (system). In America, you can change parties, but you can never change policies.”

kyle.chouinard@gmg vegas.com / 702-990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard