The New Yorker:

Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts plan to vote for whichever candidate gives crypto the biggest boost.

By Charles Bethea

In late August, Donald Trump released an ad for the fourth series of Trump-themed digital playing cards. “These cards show me dancing and even me holding some bitcoins,” the former President says, referring to the most popular cryptocurrency. If you buy fifteen or more digital cards—at ninety-nine dollars apiece—you’ll get one “beautiful physical trading card,” he adds, with “an authentic piece of my suit that I wore for the Presidential debate” in June, against Joe Biden. Buying seventy-five cards earns you a dinner with Trump in Jupiter, Florida. The pitch was in keeping with Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Wine, and Trump’s other fly-by-night merchandising ventures. But the reference to bitcoin, and another claim in the ad—“you know, they call me the crypto President”—signalled his attempt to court a new kind of voter. After calling bitcoin “a scam,” in 2021, the former President has done a one-eighty; last week, he announced the launch of a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. According to its white paper, Trump’s eighteen-year-old son, Barron, is the project’s “DeFi visionary” (“DeFi,” or decentralized finance, is a branch of the crypto industry that offers financial services); another executive is the former head of a company called Date Hotter Girls. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said, offering few further details. The announcement came after he attended a bitcoin conference in Nashville, earlier this summer, where he announced his intention to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and make America the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Even Kamala Harris is getting in on the game. On Sunday, at a fund-raiser on Wall Street, she told attendees that she would use her Presidency to “encourage innovative technologies” like “digital assets”—her first reference to crypto since embarking on the campaign trail. Still, it’s unclear whether crypto enthusiasts really represent a significant untapped voting bloc. Cryptocurrency is notably—and, to many of its fans, attractively—pseudonymous, making it hard to gauge the total number of people who own it. In 2023, the Federal Reserve estimated that there are roughly eighteen million crypto users in the United States. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump adviser turned Trump critic, who runs a hedge fund, has put the number at eighty-five million. (“You have more crypto owners than you have dog owners,” he said, earlier this year.) Only a small number of these people appear to be using crypto as a medium of exchange, given its dramatic fluctuations in value. Many seem to treat it as a stock.

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