By Morgan Sweeney | The Center Square
(The Center Square) – Vice President JD Vance, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump all spoke at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, like the president did at last year’s conference.
President Donald Trump has promised to make the U.S. the “bitcoin superpower of the world,” and Vance and the elder Trump brothers amplified that message from the conference stage.
Vance said that cryptocurrency was “here to stay” and protects Americans from some vulnerabilities that might be heightened by politics.
“Crypto is a hedge against bad policymaking from Washington, no matter what party is in control. It’s a hedge against skyrocketing inflation, which has eroded the real savings rates of Americans over the last four years,” Vance said. “And as you all know well, it’s a hedge against a private sector that’s increasingly willing to discriminate against consumers on the basis of their basic beliefs, including their politics.”
Cryptocurrency is decentralized digital currency that uses encryption and other methods to keep transactions secure. It isn’t issued by the government like the dollar or euro, nor is it managed by banks. Despite the fact that it’s virtual, however, most forms of cryptocurrency have a finite supply determined by their underlying protocols.
Cryptocurrency first came on the scene in a big way in 2009, when Bitcoin launched its network. In 15 years’ time, according to an annual report from the National Cryptocurrency Association, one in five Americans have come to own some type of cryptocurrency. Worth nothing when it started, conference hosts underscored that this was the first Bitcoin conference where the cryptocurrency was valued at over $100,000 per unit.
The elder Trump brothers have both become enthusiastic investors in cryptocurrency over time. At Wednesday’s conference, they said the world of traditional finance had been “weaponized” against them in recent years and that is part of what pushed them to become more involved in cryptocurrency.
“Between the two of us, I think we’re the most subpoenaed people in the history of the world,” Donald Trump, Jr. said. “And what we learned in those processes, as we were de-banked, as we lost insurance, as people that we would have been able to call, and they would have picked up the phone call in the first ring for decades, no longer even answered – we realized how many of the traditional sort of ‘TradFi’ systems were actually broken.”
Eric Trump later said that cryptocurrency solves problems of convenience and speed that he described traditional finance as often lacking.
“Now all of a sudden you have crypto which solves all the problems,” he said. “It makes everything cheaper, it makes it faster, it makes it safer, it makes it more transparent, it makes the whole system more functional.”
The Trump brothers predicted that in one year from now, Bitcoin would be worth between $150,000 and $175,000 per unit. Others in their panel predicted upwards of $200,000 and into seven figures.
There remains skepticism over cryptocurrency’s reliability and security, but the current administration has actively promoted investment in digital assets. In addition to appointing the White House’s first artificial intelligence and crypto czars, Trump has created a federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile and prohibited the establishment of Central Bank Digital Currencies via executive order.
The panel moderator also mentioned several bills that have been introduced in Congress that he believed would do good things for cryptocurrency in the U.S.
