JD Vance has made a risky bet on Bitcoin

In the digital paradise of Donald Trump’s America, your pension pot can finally be wholly melted down into Bitcoin. This week, the US Government updated guidance on pensions and crypto. It had previously said that companies with cryptocurrency in their pension holdings should expect to be investigated. No longer. Now the US Labor Department says that for 401(k) plans, “investment decisions should be made by fiduciaries, not DC bureaucrats.”

On Wednesday, JD Vance became the first sitting vice president to address a cryptocurrency conference when he made his way to Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. He gave a tub-thumping speech in which he joked about how the new administration had fired Joe Biden’s former crypto regulator Gary Gensler, mentioned his own $500,000 Bitcoin holdings, and told his audience that these digital assets were a hedge against inflation and “bad policymaking from Washington”. The previous week, Trump had hosted a gala dinner for holders of his memecoin.

It’s therefore little surprise that the price of Bitcoin has almost doubled since November 2024. It has lately peaked at $110,000 per coin, up from $70,000 just over six months ago. With an entire bill waiting to pass Congress, the crypto world is receiving practically everything on its wish list — and more. Interestingly, crypto lobbyists gave more to last year’s federal election campaigns than almost any other single group: $120 million. In hindsight, that was a bargain, at 0.004% of crypto’s $3 trillion global market cap.

But it was something which Vance said at the end of his speech that struck a more plangent chord, and pointed to the real future of tech. “What I’ve noticed is that very smart Right-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to Bitcoin and crypto,” he mused. “And very smart Left-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to AI.”

The implication is that crypto is inherently decentralised, an attempt to subvert or replace central banking, and that this is “Right-wing”. Meanwhile, AI relies on enormous data banks which make it fundamentally centralised: Vance half-joked in calling AI “communist”. And he mentioned the Canadian truckers — a rare example of a Right-wing protest movement — who were ultimately scuppered when Justin Trudeau weaponised Canada’s centralised banking system against them.

But if your political side could dominate either the AI industry or the cryptocurrency industry, which would you rather? For all Vance’s pomp, and for all the champagne magnums coming to Bitcoin 2026, it’s hard to shake the feeling that in the race to define the future, Bitcoin is increasingly a cringeworthy cul de sac, an embarrassing uncle who still mutters about how he could have been a star.

Crypto firms once employed world-class software engineers, and the race was on to create a blockchain superhighway that could rival the internet. There was an empire in their gaze, and genuine can-do. Now the engineering side is mid-tech, and the real art is in the marketing and, increasingly, the lobbying.

The emergence of a mass of “stablecoins” gives the trick away. When your big idea is a token which is always equal to one dollar, you’re effectively competing with Stripe for payments-processing revenue. It’s an alternative worth having. But in the very long run, revenue follows social progress, and that is all in AI. Vance ended his speech by calling on crypto to work with AI: “What happens [there] is very much going to affect in good and bad ways what happens in Bitcoin.”

Somewhere at the back of his mind must have been the contrast with China, which has taken a firm anti-digital currency position. If we take them at their own estimation, the Trumpists have bet that crypto still has more potential for innovation than it has for economic destruction. And now they might muse that some as yet undiscovered alloy of AI and crypto could, somewhere down the line, produce something China cannot match.

It’s the betting strategy that many working the Las Vegas craps tables down the road from Bitcoin 2025 will recognise. That’s the strategy of feeling lucky and not worrying too much about the downsides. As Vance spoke, some would have been pawning their watches to pay for the parking.