“Shitcoin Magazine,” tweeted Bitcoin educator and author Knut Svanholm about the event that BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine, organized in Las Vegas last week. Dancing cows dashed across my feed. “It’s a political convention now,” I overheard two attendees saying as they exited the Nakamoto stage, heads shaking. Nigel Farage, the inflammatory British politician and leader of Reform UK, was shouting on stage about becoming prime minister. A somewhat calmer personality, Vice President JD Vance spoke about “crypto” and thanked Coinbase.
Word on the (online) street is that Bitcoin 2025 was captured by political and shitcoin-y interests. Our own technical editor, Shinobi, opted out of mass surveillance and bailed for freer pastures at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Erik Cason was uncharacteristically polite (“shitcoin adjacent”), though he was there in person, happily signing the Cryptosovereignty book that Bitcoin Magazine Books published in 2023.
“None of my Bitcoiner friends come here anymore,” said Ben, an entrepreneur who runs a Bitcoin business, on the fence about coming back next year.
Whenever I mention that I work for Bitcoin Magazine, I usually have to field questions about shitcoinery and political shilling (Are you a MAGA dude now?!). Coming to Vegas was inspection time for me — or at least a chance to see what it is that troubles so many people.
With the glamor of the Strip itself and its sensory overload, it’d be easy to be dazzled — plus, it was the first time I had left Fort Europa for the land of the free in years, first time in Vegas, and first time at an American Bitcoin event. It’d be easy for me to simply dismiss the haters by paraphrasing Taylor (“haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate…”).
While sitting down in the whale pass area the Deep, a hipster-looking gentleman started talking to me about how Bitcoin is fundamentally broken and that I should investigate his energy-based shitcoin instead. Waiting for Vance’s speech in the main hall, I was introduced to three young dudes dressed up to perfection and barely out of college, at the conference “to land a job in the industry” — i.e., grifters. A mid-60s technology dude interjected himself into the conversation, bragged about how he worked on tech for Microsoft in the ’90s, and explained how blockchain (not Bitcoin) is the future — only to have us scan the NFC card he had implanted in his left hand. Ugh.
Thus, it wasn’t difficult to see the things all these people online had objected to: Our conference was a party, or “an elaborate Bitcoin extraction scheme,” a “circus, shitcoin fest,” or stablecoin mania. Plus:
They’re not wrong. But honestly, you don’t have to look.
Here’s an underappreciated order to the known universe: To each successful movement or phenomenon, parasites and fraudsters are drawn. It’s why the shitcoin guys are around Bitcoin events and why the politicians are pandering to our cause. Vegas itself is the center of gravity for that sort of thing — gambling, nudity, alcohol, prostitution, and other dopamine-inducing stimulants. I first titled this take What Hookers in Vegas Can Teach Us About Politicians at Bitcoin 2025; the simple observation is that fraudsters, grifters, and scammers go to where the value is. Parasites feed off healthy, growing, flourishing organisms.
“Scammers flooding in,” as Tomer Strolight post-conference tweeted, is thus the least surprising thing ever.
We’re succeeding, growing, and becoming if not respectable then at least a household name. The FT and WSJ covering us feel somewhere between “…then they laugh at you“ and “…then they fight you” stages.
Running around meeting people — hardcore Bitcoiners I’ve only ever met online, authors and writers and editors I’ve worked with (they were all in Vegas, since that was the place to be…) — and attending the sum total of three presentations, I felt what Wayne Vaughan of Bitcoin First described:
You can just meet people, just do things.
To make an obvious analogy: The internet is littered with porn, gambling, and cat videos, and it’s the most successful technology in a generation. You don’t have to look; you can just work and provide value instead of wasting away your life talking to shitcoiners or being annoyed at politicians and other fraudsters doing their things.
“Cozying up to any government is a bad idea,” concluded the WSJ piece, citing a “wing” of purist Bitcoin that we all feel. Yes, agreed. But the puritism that its opposite requires condemns us to irrelevancy — belittles and betrays the broader mission.
So yeah: the grifters, the parasites, the politicians, and the financial engineers are here. Good for them. That they’re here is a sign of victory.
Knock me over with a feather, haters.
Come join us for Bitcoin 2026 and see for yourself.
