The digital currency—popular among a mostly white, mostly libertarian contingent—might prove useful in communities where it's relatively difficult to secure a loan or transfer money.
Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currency—when he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a newly-discovered oil reserve in his backyard—he loves trading it and tracking its movement in the markets.
In 2013, Jackson, a 39-year-old Las Vegas-based pro poker player and former writer for Upworthy, started spreading the gospel of the currency via his blog, Blacks in Bitcoin, where he claimed that he would “spontaneously combust” if he had no other outlet to voice his obsession with the digital barter.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like to own a piece of email technology in 1994?” asks Jackson, who believes the currency is still very much in its early adoption phase. “That’s what Bitcoin is like right now, and it’s only getting bigger.” While it's still being debated whether Bitcoin will ever gain a full foothold in the global financial ecosystem, there has been less discussion about the currency’s potential effects within communities that aren’t well served by traditional financial services. Bitcoin’s promise in the African American community has been especially overlooked—more time has been spent worrying that the currency would facilitate criminal activity.
Jackson doesn’t neatly fit the image many have of the typical Bitcoin user—the affluent, white, libertarian-leaning male. Jackson isn’t white, and he’s neither an Austrian School devotee nor a card-carrying member of the Seasteading Institute. (“I’m not what you would call an anarcho-capitalist,” he says. “I do believe that government can provide basic rules so that everybody can get along.”) As overall awareness of Bitcoin has grown, African Americans like Jackson might be able to serve as the currency's cultural ambassador to certain minority communities.
From the looks of things, that’s where the currency needs a higher profile. A study conducted in May 2014 by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Massachusetts Division of Banks showed that African Americans are less likely than whites and Hispanics to have heard about virtual currencies in general. Another study, released in July 2014 by the digital media company Morning Consult, found that African Americans are less likely than white and Hispanics to know “a lot” about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin traders might interpret those findings to mean that there isn’t a market for the currency in the black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesn’t believe that’s the case. Having written online commentaries and appeared on cable financial-news outlets, Colas is one of Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal evangelists. He believes the currency would be useful to a variety of demographics. “Bitcoin is a Rorschach test for anybody interested in banking, because different people see different things in what Bitcoin can offer different communities,” he says.
Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currency—when he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a newly-discovered oil reserve in his backyard—he loves trading it and tracking its movement in the markets.
In 2013, Jackson, a 39-year-old Las Vegas-based pro poker player and former writer for Upworthy, started spreading the gospel of the currency via his blog, Blacks in Bitcoin, where he claimed that he would “spontaneously combust” if he had no other outlet to voice his obsession with the digital barter.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like to own a piece of email technology in 1994?” asks Jackson, who believes the currency is still very much in its early adoption phase. “That’s what Bitcoin is like right now, and it’s only getting bigger.” While it's still being debated whether Bitcoin will ever gain a full foothold in the global financial ecosystem, there has been less discussion about the currency’s potential effects within communities that aren’t well served by traditional financial services. Bitcoin’s promise in the African American community has been especially overlooked—more time has been spent worrying that the currency would facilitate criminal activity.
Jackson doesn’t neatly fit the image many have of the typical Bitcoin user—the affluent, white, libertarian-leaning male. Jackson isn’t white, and he’s neither an Austrian School devotee nor a card-carrying member of the Seasteading Institute. (“I’m not what you would call an anarcho-capitalist,” he says. “I do believe that government can provide basic rules so that everybody can get along.”) As overall awareness of Bitcoin has grown, African Americans like Jackson might be able to serve as the currency's cultural ambassador to certain minority communities.
From the looks of things, that’s where the currency needs a higher profile. A study conducted in May 2014 by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Massachusetts Division of Banks showed that African Americans are less likely than whites and Hispanics to have heard about virtual currencies in general. Another study, released in July 2014 by the digital media company Morning Consult, found that African Americans are less likely than white and Hispanics to know “a lot” about Bitcoin.
Bitcoin traders might interpret those findings to mean that there isn’t a market for the currency in the black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesn’t believe that’s the case. Having written online commentaries and appeared on cable financial-news outlets, Colas is one of Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal evangelists. He believes the currency would be useful to a variety of demographics. “Bitcoin is a Rorschach test for anybody interested in banking, because different people see different things in what Bitcoin can offer different communities,” he says.
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