Some housekeeping: for Memorial Day, I’m running a 15% off sale on annual subscriptions. Because freelance is horrific and not sustainable, everything I do is out of pocket. If 16 of you sign up for an annual subscription at the discounted rate, that pays for my hotel. If 10 of you sign up, that pays for my round trip flight. It’s a terrible business model that doesn’t work, and subscriptions have been plummeting since inauguration. This is the link, and it’s good through end of day Tuesday the 27th.
Greetings from Las Vegas, where the 2025 Bitcoin Conference will be kicking off tomorrow.
Last week, Donald Trump hosted a dinner for the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP memecoin. Perhaps the most noteworthy dinner guest was Justin Sun, who was charged with fraudulently manipulating the market by the SEC under Joe Biden. After Sun started buying up $TRUMP, the new administration’s SEC decided to put a pause on the investigation (Sun was the largest holder of $TRUMP at the dinner Thursday night).
On Sunday, Sun posted on X that he was wrapping up his week in DC and headed to Las Vegas for the Bitcoin Conference. Sun had not previously been announced as a speaker or listed on the website as a guest, but that evening, the conference added him to the speaker line up (as of 5:00pm PDT on Monday the 26th, Sun has not been added to the actual agenda).
Plenty of people involved in the government will be speaking at this conference, including Vice President JD Vance, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla), Rep. Brian Jack (R-Ga), Rep Tom Emmer (R-Minn), Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis), Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn), Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn), Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va), White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Digital Assets Bo Hines, Tyler Williams (Treasury), and Rosie Rios (America250). Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, and Brandon Lutnick, the son of US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, will also be speaking.
The conference comes on the heels of crypto trading platform Coinbase announcing a customer data breach, including customers’ transaction history, account balances, photo IDs, and addresses. The breach was done over the course of half a year, by bribing low paid contractors who live out of the country. Essentially, this allows the hackers to approximate the net worth of individuals whose home addresses they have.
Dozens of crypto-based abductions have happened over the last year, potentially making the hack a very serious hazard for those whose data was stolen. Some in the industry have downplayed the seriousness of the hack, and others have said that the real culprit is the regulation that requires the exchanges collect KYC (Know Your Customer) information.
Multiple representatives of Coinbase, including CEO Faryar Shirzad, will be at Bitcoin 2025, but it’s unclear if any of their panels will address the issue. Shirzad will be on panels with Donalds, Steil, and Jack.
The full speaker list is available here, but there are other events outside of the main conference that feature even more crypto-friendly folks (including NYC’s Eric Adams!).
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