Is this still Satoshi’s Bitcoin? Bitcoin Conference keynotes dominated by politicians and corporations

Vegas glitters differently when thirty thousand badge-wearing bitcoiners clog the marble concourses of the Venetian, screens flashing a frothy $105-to-106k tape for BTC, and every espresso line buzzing with “hash-rate” small talk.

Three-day festivals usually disperse into noise, yet this one distilled a single theme: the conversation has vaulted beyond legitimacy questions. Governments, regulators, and megacorps now jostle over integration, taxation, and monetisation.

“Tether will be the biggest Bitcoin miner in the world,” Paolo Ardoino boomed, recounting $13 billion in profit and revealing “more than 100,000 Bitcoin that we own as a company,” before tossing off a maximalist haiku, “Bitcoin is perfect, gold is imperfect.” Investors inhaled the news of a further $2 billion sunk into energy projects, sensing a stable-coin juggernaut pivoting from liquidity plumbing to literal dig-the-ground infrastructure.

Bitcoin continues role as political campaigning prop

Across the aisle of national flags, Pakistan’s Special Assistant Bilal bin Saqib declared, “Today, I announce that the Pakistani government is setting up their own government-led Bitcoin strategic reserve … we will be holding these Bitcoins and will never sell them,” pairing that vow with 2 GW of surplus-power mining capacity.

Union Jacks popped next when Nigel Farage strode onstage, quipping, “We are the first political party in Britain that can accept donations in bitcoin,” and touting a draft bill slicing crypto CGT to 10 percent while wiring a “bitcoin digital reserve” into the Bank of England. The crowd roared, half for the policy, half for the spectacle of a Westminster veteran recruiting hodlers. Farage framed Westminster stagnation as an opening for a crypto-powered populist insurgency, promising a “crypto powerhouse” future.

However, with only five MPs and a recent poll putting Farage at the bottom of the pile of voter-preferred Prime Ministers, it’s the power of his rhetoric in ‘waking up’ the major political parties to the true importance of Bitcoin in his speech that is the most consequential here.

Regulatory mood music softened in tandem. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce conceded, “We need to create a good environment for the good actors and a bad one for the bad actors,” warning that enforcement-by-ambiguity chases innovators offshore, and later hammered the point, “We can’t ignore it … value will eventually be incorporated into traditional…