Trump ‘orange-pilled’ by three bitcoiners in Puerto Rico, $100 million

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A block away from the neon-lit buzz of Lower Broadway, where honky-tonk pours onto the city’s main drag at all hours, stands the Music City Center, a venue that’s hosted everything from craft beer conferences to a performance by the legendary Dolly Parton.

In late July, the complex filled up for something entirely different. It was the biggest bitcoin conference of the year, and the headline act was none other than former President Donald Trump.

For nearly 50 minutes on a Saturday afternoon in the country music capital, the Republican nominee for president extolled the virtues of bitcoin and spelled out what a second Trump administration would mean for the crypto industry to a packed crowd of conferencegoers who’d spent hours getting through the Secret Service’s tight security protocol.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted and made in the USA,” Trump declared, in a message targeted to the industry’s bitcoin miners, who secure the network by running large banks of high-powered machines. “We will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, ‘Please, please, President, we don’t want any more electricity. We can’t stand it!'”

The speech, which read like it was straight out of a bitcoiner’s bible, was quite the about-face for an ex-president who three years earlier had dismissed the cryptocurrency as a “scam.” Trump was, no doubt, lured by the potential of huge amounts of donor money from an industry that sees itself as under constant attack from the Biden-Harris administration and the heavy regulatory hand of SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

Trump told the audience in Nashville that he’d raised $25 million in crypto-related funds, a number that CNBC hasn’t been able to independently verify.

Turning Trump from a skeptic into a sudden bitcoin evangelist took the work, behind closed doors, of a small army of bitcoiners and other crypto advocates who were able to maneuver their way into the candidate’s inner circle. In particular, three friends in Puerto Rico came together to try and convince the Republican presidential hopeful of bitcoin’s value, and to eventually make that position loud and clear to a key audience in Nashville.

In bitcoin parlance, Trump was “orange-pilled.” It’s a play on the phrase “red pill” from the 1999 film, “The Matrix.” In the movie, the main character, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), is given a choice of taking a red pill, which offers access to the unsettling truth about the world, or a blue pill, which signifies a false but far more comforting version of…