Bitcoin miners at Donald Trump’s closed-door event say he thinks bitcoin can help win AI

• Donald Trump says he wants all future bitcoin to be minted in the U.S.
• The proclamation comes after the former president convened a working group of the country’s top bitcoin miners on Tuesday in Mar-a-Lago.
• The coalition included representatives from Riot Platforms, Marathon Digital Holdings, Terawulf, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, Arkon Energy, Cholla Energy and Exacore.

This past Tuesday night in Palm Beach, Florida, about a dozen bitcoin mining executives and experts sat down with former president Donald Trump for an hour and a half in a small tea room at the Mar-a-Lago Club. As a steady drizzle fell outside, they sipped from Trump-branded water bottles and tried to sell him on the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

The meeting marked the first time the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee — recently convicted of 34 felonies in New York — had taken a meeting with the technologists securing the $1.3 trillion bitcoin network.

The intimate gathering brought together a coalition of some of the biggest private and public American miners in the business, including representatives from Riot Platforms, Marathon Digital Holdings, Terawulf, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, Arkon Energy, Cholla Energy and Exacore.

CNBC spoke to half the miners who attended the closed door session on Tuesday, including the CEO of Riot Platforms. Jason Les told CNBC that one of the group’s top talking points was the fact that the U.S. is number one in a lot of things, and it should be number one at bitcoin, especially as the world’s top coin touches new all-time price highs this year. Bitcoin is up 160% to around $67,000 since June 2023.

Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) — who is the ranking member on the Senate’s Banking Committee and Finance Subcommittee, as well as a vocal proponent of the digital asset industry broadly, and bitcoin mining in particular — was also there to help guide what participants described as a free-flowing and wide-ranging discussion on bitcoin, energy, job creation and the push to beat China in the artificial intelligence arms race.

Many agreed that the former president was collaborative, had well-informed questions and seemed genuinely interested in how bitcoin miners could help solve America’s energy deficit problem.

BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, who organized the mining sit-down with Trump, says that the meeting is part of a larger push to support the former president’s bid to return to the White House.

“Our industry intends to make bitcoin and crypto a defining issue for the 2024 election,” Bailey said of the effort. “As an industry we are committed to raising over $100 million and turning out more than 5,000,000 voters for the Trump reelection effort.”

Less than four hours after Trump’s roundtable wrapped, the former president took to social media to extol the virtues of the bitcoin mining business.

“Bitcoin mining may be our last line of defense against a CBDC,” Trump posted shortly before midnight on Tuesday.

“Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies are created through a process known as proof-of-work, in which miners around the world run high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens.

The process requires heaps of electricity, leading miners to seek out the cheapest sources of power. Many have begun to set up shop in the U.S. in the last few years, much to the chagrin of a mix of mostly Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“It’s such an easy issue for politicians,” in part because there is “no major ask that we have to change the rules or anything else,” Les, who runs a bitcoin mining company with a market cap of about $3 billion, told CNBC.

“We just want to be treated like everyone else,” Les added, noting that more than one in four people in the U.S. now owns bitcoin, according to a survey recently conducted by bitcoin financial services firm Unchained.

Bitcoin that’s “made in America”

For months, Trump — who recently launched his latest non-fungible token collection on the solana blockchain in April — has been making increasingly bullish comments on crypto.

He is now accepting digital currency donations and has pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self-custody their coins, meaning that they don’t rely on a centralized entity like Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead, do it themselves in personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. Trump also vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington in May to keep Sen. Warren and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.

In early June in San Francisco, technologists, crypto executives, and venture capitalists paid up to $300,000 per ticket to join a Trump fundraiser that ultimately raised more than $12 million.

And then on Tuesday, Trump declared that all future bitcoin will be minted in the U.S., should he return to the White House.

Geoff Kendrick, who heads up digital assets research at Standard Chartered, recently wrote that he expects bitcoin to reach the $100,000 price threshold as the U.S. approaches the November presidential election and $150,000 by the end of the year if Trump wins.

Decentralization is a key feature of bitcoin, because it means the network isn’t controlled by any entity and can’t be shut down — even if a government disapproves. Roughly 37% of the bitcoin network’s miners are located in the U.S., with China closely following at 21% of bitcoin’s global processing power despite Beijing banning the practice in 2021.

“He wants to keep all of the remaining bitcoin mining in the U.S. and out of China,” Matthew Schultz, CleanSpark’s executive chairman and director, who attended the Mar-a-Lago working group, told CNBC. “For him to be legitimately engaged in the bitcoin industry, and understanding the way that mining works, was really awesome.“

The group also touched on doing more to support U.S.-made ASICs, short for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, which are the purpose-built rigs used to mine bitcoin. Most ASICs are built in China, but Auradine is a U.S.-based startup that is manufacturing this equipment.

Jayson Browder, senior vice president of Government Affairs at Marathon Digital Holdings, said that he brought one of these machines to show Trump to highlight the significance of “bringing chips manufacturing back to the U.S.”

The emphasis on protectionist policies that safeguard domestic manufacturing echoes the former president’s “America First” economic agenda.

Trump also expressed concern over the U.S. launching a central bank digital currency, or CBDC — that is, a digital coin issued by the Federal Reserve that could grant the government greater access to personal spending data.

Bitcoin is seen by many in the industry as the antithesis of a CBDC because it is a censorship-resistant and borderless currency that is not centrally issued, nor constrained by geographic or governmental boundaries. Trump wrote that bitcoin mining may be the “last line of defense against a CBDC.”

When asked about the Tuesday evening meeting, Brian Hughes, senior advisor to the Trump administration, told CNBC that “crypto innovators and others in the technology sector are under attack from Biden and Democrats” and that “while Biden stifles innovation with more regulation and higher taxes, President Trump is ready to encourage American leadership in this and other emerging technologies.”

Trump’s pro-crypto campaign platform comes as polling data shows that crypto matters more to the voting public now than in past presidential elections. A Harris poll funded by the spot bitcoin ETF issuer Grayscale found that one in three U.S. voters…