May 27–29, 2025 · The Venetian, Las Vegas
Let me tell you my favourite fact in all of finance, and I promise you need to know absolutely nothing about computers to enjoy it. When Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor switched the thing on in January 2009, he tucked a little message into its very first entry — the digital equivalent of a foundation stone — and the message he chose was a headline from that morning’s Times, about the Chancellor preparing yet another bailout for the banks. It was a note pinned to the door. This exists because the old system failed you.
Sixteen years later, thirty thousand people assembled in a Las Vegas casino to hear the Vice President of the United States explain how tremendously keen his government is. I have turned that sentence over many times and still cannot decide whether it is a triumph, a betrayal, or simply the most elegant joke anyone has played on anybody this decade. Which is exactly why Bitcoin 2025 was the most interesting conference of the year, and why I’d like to walk you through it even if you’ve never bought so much as a penny’s worth of the stuff.
The revolution gets a keynote
The scale was considerable: north of thirty thousand attendees, some four hundred speakers, around five thousand companies, all crammed into a resort where the ceilings are painted to look like the sky, which felt thematically appropriate for an industry so fond of telling you the limit doesn’t exist.
The guest list, though, was the actual news. JD Vance became the first sitting Vice President in American history to address a Bitcoin conference, urging the industry to fight its political battles now, warning that a three-trillion-dollar business would move abroad without clear rules, and disclosing his own modest holdings with a flourish. The White House crypto czar set out policy. A senator discussed her Bitcoin reserve bill. Two of the President’s sons took the stage. Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy has hoovered up Bitcoin with the single-mindedness of a man filling a bunker, gave a keynote so evangelical that one attendee reportedly compared it to scripture.
Now, hold the names lightly and look at their shape. Bitcoin was dreamed up by cypherpunks — a lovely word for privacy-obsessed programmers who considered governments the problem rather than the solution, and who wanted money that no official could freeze, print, or confiscate. Sixteen years on, the government has arrived, delighted, bearing gifts. The cypherpunks have been issued lanyards.
The most complicated ovation in the room
Nowhere did that feel odder than when Ross Ulbricht walked out to a standing ovation, in his first public appearance since leaving prison. Ulbricht built Silk Road, the anonymous online marketplace that gave Bitcoin its first real use and sold, among other things, a very great deal of illegal drugs. He was convicted, sentenced to two life terms plus 40 years, served over 11 of them, and in January 2025 received a full pardon from President Trump.
The room rose and cheered. I’d gently ask you to sit inside that discomfort rather than rush out the other side; both readings are sincerely held. To his supporters, the sentence was monstrously out of proportion for a man who sold no drugs himself and killed nobody, and the pardon corrects a genuine cruelty. To his critics, the site enabled industrial-scale drug dealing, the pardon looks suspiciously like a favour to a useful voting bloc, and a hall full of people cheering its founder says something they’d rather it didn’t. I’ve no verdict to hand you, and I’d be wary of anyone who does.
What I will say is this: any movement that gives a pardoned man a standing ovation in one hall while, down the corridor, hosting a panel earnestly titled Are Bitcoiners Becoming Sycophants of the State? is a movement arguing with itself in public. Those are almost always the ones worth watching.
Michels and the iron law
There’s an old idea that explains this better than any market commentary. In 1911, a German sociologist named Robert Michels proposed what he called the iron law of oligarchy, which holds that every organisation — no matter how radical, no matter how fiercely democratic at birth — eventually grows a ruling class of its own. Revolutionaries acquire offices. Movements acquire lobbyists. The people who stormed the establishment tend, given a decade or two and a decent expense account, to become it.
Bitcoin exists, technically speaking, to remove the trusted middlemen from money. In 2025, it acquired a spectacular collection of extremely well-connected ones. Whether that is success or capture is honestly, properly contested. One side argues that political protection is precisely what a young technology needs to survive, and that ideological purity has never once prevented a government from crushing something it disliked. The other worries that a system whose entire promise is that it answers to nobody has quietly started answering to somebody — and that political favour, unlike mathematics, can be revoked after the next election. Both are serious arguments. I’d be suspicious of anyone who finds this easy.
The money behind the microphone
The most quietly staggering moment came from Paolo Ardoino, who runs Tether. A brief explanation, since this is the bit that trips people up: Tether issues a stablecoin, a digital token designed to be worth exactly one dollar, always, so traders have somewhere calm to park money between bets. To keep that promise, Tether must hold real dollars — and it holds them, in enormous quantity, as US government IOUs.
How enormous? Ardoino revealed the company sits on more than $120 billion of US Treasury bills, keeps over a hundred thousand Bitcoin besides, has ploughed some two billion dollars into energy and mining, and intends to become the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet.
Do read that twice. A company built on a token meant to sit outside the traditional financial system is now one of the world’s more consequential lenders to the American government. Supporters call it vindication and point out that the dollar and Bitcoin were never enemies. Critics call it a magnificent hedge by a firm growing rich on the very machine its customers were promised an escape hatch from. The maddening thing is that both appear to be entirely true.
How I read it
I came away fascinated rather than converted, which is my favourite place to stand. The technical substance underneath the pageantry was real. People are building faster, cheaper ways to spend Bitcoin rather than merely hoard it — the Lightning network, which settles small payments in a blink, was buzzing away on little contactless cards all over the venue. That unglamorous plumbing work carries on no matter who is keynoting.
But do hold the political embrace lightly. A favour granted is a favour that can be taken back. An asset whose entire pitch is that it bows to nobody looks rather different when it’s being cheered from a podium by one of the most powerful men in America. Perhaps that’s what growing up looks like. Perhaps it’s the punchline of a joke that Satoshi, wherever he is, is enjoying enormously.
I hold no political opinion for you to borrow here, and I’d trust nobody who hands you one wrapped around a financial product. My advice is duller and, I think, more useful: understand a thing thoroughly before you go anywhere near it, which is rather the point of everything I write here. Start small, start slowly, and never with money you’d miss. And do remember that the message hidden in that very first block was not, in any sense, a request for permission.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a read on the room, not a political opinion and not financial advice. Where you land on any of it is entirely your own affair.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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