Donald Trump once trashed bitcoin as ‘based on thin air.’ Now, he’s

Nashville
CNN
 — 

For a time, Donald Trump would have made for an unlikely headliner at a cryptocurrency confab.

As president, Trump declared bitcoin “not money” and criticized it as “highly volatile and based on thin air.” He cautioned that crypto assets helped facilitate illegal underground markets.

“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2019. “It is called the United States Dollar!”

But on Saturday, Trump will address the cryptocurrency industry’s largest annual gathering here in Nashville not as a cynic but as one of its best-known supporters – the culmination of a total reversal on the issue during the former president’s latest White House bid.

Despite cryptocurrency’s troubling recent history and his own past reservations, Trump has fully embraced the hype and hopes of the nascent industry. His campaign now accepts bitcoin donations – and has collected about $4 million worth, a source with knowledge of his fundraising said. He has attacked the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate the industry as a “war on crypto” without acknowledging the massive fraud schemes that have shattered public confidence in digital currencies. And he has vowed as president to make it easier for cryptocurrency mining companies to operate in the United States.

“Otherwise, the other countries are going to have it,” Trump said earlier this month in Wisconsin.

The industry, in turn, has embraced Trump. Its leaders and investors have donated millions of dollars to his campaign and aligned political committees. They are cheerleaders for his candidacy to their sizable online audiences and are now providing him a platform to speak directly to 20,000 of their most engaged followers expected at this year’s Bitcoin Conference.

“A lot of these people consider themselves single-issue voters,” said tech writer Jacob Silverman, author of the best-selling book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.” “If Trump or anyone else says they’re pro-bitcoin, that matters to them.”

Since Trump voiced his opposition to bitcoin in 2019, the volatile industry has only faced more turbulence, most notably the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Once the face of a company that counted comedian Larry David and superstar quarterback Tom Brady among its celebrity endorsers, Bankman-Fried was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme through his companies.

Trump’s campaign would not say what sparked the former president’s 180-degree…