Many types of power graced the ornate theater and marble lobby of Belmont’s Fisher Center this week for ImagineIF, the second annual high-profile convening from Bitcoin Park partner Rod Roudi. A curated guest list — nuclear experts, think-tankers, blockchainers, Bitcoiners, congressmen, top brass from NVIDIA, both of Tennessee’s U.S. senators — reflects the vast professional and social network boosting Nashville’s stature as a glitzy technofuturist hub.

Roudi and others helped build Nashville’s cryptocurrency scene with Bitcoin Park. The city also hosts BTC Media, which publishes Bitcoin Magazine, and brought thousands — including a campaigning Donald Trump — to the Music City Center in 2024 for the currency’s premier international conference (which will return to Nashville in 2027). The campus in Hillsboro Village has become a meeting place for entrepreneurs, hackers, media and professionals, hosting regular meetup events relating Bitcoin to topics like digital anonymity, software development and U.S. Treasury policy.

This week’s conference fueled the ambition and scale of technological progress with its central theme: completing the sentence, “Imagine if ...” Twenty-minute presentations that fell somewhere between TED Talks and university lectures had provocative titles like “ImagineIF AI Worked for Freedom,” “ImagineIF Tyranny had Nowhere to Hide” and “ImagineIF the U.S. Led the Convergence Decade.” The latter was a Q&A discussion moderated by U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty that circled Tennessee for a large-scale data center buildout to help American tech outmaneuver Chinese competitors. Blackburn’s presentation “Imagine IF It All Got Built Here” was alongside Deputy Gov. Stuart McWhorter, who has led economic development under Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday afternoon. 

Later on, when asked to speculate about Tennessee's future, Blackburn shared her nuclear vision.