LAS VEGAS—It would be easy to make fun of Bitcoin 2025. There is the cheesiness of the Vegas trade show atmosphere, the sales talk, the fanboy vibes when certain speakers take the stage, the ubiquitous AI slop. It would be easy to make fun of the talks, some with the feeling of a tent revival: the zealots‘ faith in get-rich-quick, the baggy, ill-fitting suits that convey self-doubt, the shadow of a kid who was made fun of in high school.
But it would be too easy. And if it’s one thing that we as a society should have learned over the past decade, it’s that making fun of something doesn’t make it go away. These computer nerds, these “societal rejects,” these pointdexters; you may have laughed at them, but now they’re filthy rich.
Four years ago, when the author first covered the Bitcoin conference in Miami, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the price of one Bitcoin was $36,320. But when Vice President J.D. Vance took the stage in 2025, one Bitcoin was now worth $107,633—nearly a 200% increase.
There is a smug satisfaction in buying early, since the bet has paid off. This is a crowd that believes that your intelligence is correlated with your net worth.
Yet, 95% of Bitcoin’s 21 million coins have already been mined, and of that number, nearly all of it is held in just 4,000 wallets. Many of these super-endowed “whales”—those who have more than 1,000 Bitcoin (more than $100 million in USD)—are already known entities: Tesla owns more than 11,000 Bitcoin.
Both the USA and China own nearly 200,000 each. Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy owns more than 580,000. More than 6,000 are owned by the country of El Salvador, where Trump has set up an abduction pipeline to concentration camps that dictatorial President Nayib Bukele has offered for rent.
Approximately 860,000 bitcoins are owned by the BlackRock and Fidelity Bitcoin ETFs, the two biggest. Although these are publicly traded funds which anyone can buy into, 20-25% are owned by institutional investors, including major financial firms like Goldman Sachs, and presumably, significant fractions are also held by extremely rich people who do not have to disclose their holdings.
Altogether, the 10 largest holders of Bitcoin hold around 4,000,000 Bitcoin, or more than 20% of the circulating supply. What’s really being mined, then, is a new type of robber-baron wealth, held even further outside the regulatory structures of governments. The political system that hitches itself to this type of inequality boggles the mind; it certainly can’t bode well for those who own none of it.
A serious sign is how even the sitting Vice President speaks of Bitcoin as a hedge against the U.S. dollar. Bitcoin economist Lyn Alden delivers a talk on how the end of the dollar is not just inevitable—it’s welcome.
At the end of the day, Bitcoin 2025 is a conference full of self-styled MAGA patriots and libertarians who would like nothing more than to see the value of the dollar plummet, so long as it depletes their enemies and enriches themselves.
It would be great, comforting even, to just make fun of these guys—if only they weren’t so good at making money and cozying up to the most terrifying avatars of neo-fascist power. Indeed, if it’s one oil-slick vein that runs just under the surface of everything here, it’s a barely concealed sense of resentment and a desire for revenge. This is fertile ground for an unholy union between MAGA and new, unregulated forms of Silicon Valley finance.
There seem to be two main brokers working towards cementing this alliance: America250, a non-profit organization attached to Congress and the Trump presidency that sponsored the first day of the Bitcoin Conference. People’s World approached communication agents contracted by a third party at the organization’s booth, and was told that no one present could answer our inquiries.
The questions were simple: was money spent to sponsor Bitcoin2025, and was America250 present at other conferences in the same way? Further communication attempts with America250’s spokespeople via email and phone were acknowledged but went unanswered. Perhaps they were preparing for the VVIP invitation-only event at nearby Resorts World Casino.
The second broker for this new partnership is a 41-year-old Ross Ulbricht. He closed the conference, as he did in 2021, but only this time, he was in person and not delivering his remarks via prison pay phone. Despite being freed from his 240-year sentence for just a few months, he seems remarkably recovered, comfortably speaking to the assembled thousands. The crowd was rapt.
He opened his remarks on stage to praise Donald Trump for freeing him on his first day in office, part of the President’s deal with the Libertarian Party and the Bitcoin community to gain votes. He called him a “man of integrity.”
Then, Ulbricht began to describe the primary lesson he learned in prison: that of unity. It is possible, he told the audience, to be both decentralized and unified. He spoke about his struggle for freedom and about the myriad groups that sought a pardon for him from Trump, but it would seem that he was also speaking about the need to build right-wing unity. He was speaking about how “true freedom is yet to be won” and urged a front against the enemy, who remains shadowy and unnamed.
His appearance on stage, despite having recently spent the previous 4,000 days in a federal jail cell, was relaxed and almost pastoral. He was more charismatic than the previous speakers of the past three days, including the Vice President, and certainly more authentic.
Since the first day of the conference, the bid price of Ulbricht’s prison items has increased. By the end of his remarks on stage, one of his prison ID cards was auctioned off for 5.5 Bitcoin (nearly $600,000). His items sold for a total of 12.31 Bitcoin, or more than $1.3 million. Nothing to compensate for the 144,000 coins the U.S. Government seized in 2015 when he was arrested and Silk Road was shut down, but more than enough to start a new and far more comfortable life.
It would be easy to write him off just as the impulse has been for Bitcoin itself to be written off—just as so many laughed at Trump and the MAGA movement—but it would be ill-advised. Though his future plans remain unknown, he certainly acted as the ideological glue holding together the conference, helping to smooth over the presence of the larger interests like TradFi (traditional finance such as BlackRock and Fidelity) and Big Oil as if to say, “see—they work for us now.”
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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