The Crypto President Has Arrived, and the Grift Is Booming

With Donald Trump back in the White House, the floodgates for cryptocurrency scams have been flung wide open.

Key Speakers At The Bitcoin 2024 Conference

Donald Trump speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 27, 2024. (Brett Carlsen / Bloomberg via Getty Images


“You’re going to be very happy with me,” Donald Trump told thousands of rapt Bitcoin believers back in July. I was standing within the throng, having gone down to Nashville to cover the annual Bitcoin conference last summer.

The conference hall was chilly and darkened, but the energy level was feverishly high, the crowd whooping and hollering as the then-presidential hopeful hit all the right notes, calling Bitcoin a “miracle of humanity” and rattling off a list of promises — the most popular among them, to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the crypto-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC under Gensler was widely decried by the crypto community for what they claimed was the commission’s “reign of terror against crypto.” Trump also promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, a Bitcoin-fueled black market for drugs and contraband, and declared that he would create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” with Bitcoin that has been seized by the Department of Justice.

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