Dispatch From Trump Bitcoin 2024 Conference in Nashville

On July 17, about a week before Donald Trump took the stage in front of 8,000 or so Bitcoin fans in Nashville, David Bailey, the chief executive officer of Bitcoin Magazine, giddily explained how he and his friends had gotten the candidate to come. Bailey, a baby-faced 33-year-old with a bushy beard, was appearing on a podcast called Galaxy Brains, and he was telling the host, a crypto researcher, that it was so crazy he’d started writing a diary of sorts to keep track of everything that was happening. “You could never publish this, because literally no one would ever believe that this was a real thing,” Bailey said.

It was easy to see why he was fired up. The conference at which Trump would be speaking, put on by Bailey’s company, is for Bitcoin’s true believers—maximalists who believe it’s the one true crypto coin and the future world currency. Just a few years ago, the conference was as fringy as a furry convention or the Gathering of the Juggalos, and Trump was publicly calling Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Now he would be jetting in to get onstage and endorse their digital money. It was as if he was slathering his face with black-and-white clown makeup, Juggalo-style, and getting onstage to rap with Insane Clown Posse.