Bitcoin is nothing more than "white privilege"

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According to an online poll from Simulacrum, the average user is a 32.1-year-old libertarian male. By users’ accounts, those men are mostly white.

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Breaking that down, about 95 percent of Bitcoin users are men, about 61 percent say they’re not religious, and about 44 percent describe themselves as “libertarian / anarcho-capitalist.”

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Those libertarian tendencies are generally held by white men. “Compared to the general population,” an American Values survey reported last year, “libertarians are significantly more likely to be non-Hispanic white, male, and young.” Specifically, 94 percent are white, and 68 percent are men.

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Why does Bitcoin specifically have this demographic makeup? Well, there’s a fair amount of privilege built directly into the currency: In order to buy the sometimes wildly expensive currency, Bitcoin users need to be wealthy. And they can afford to put their wealth into a currency that isn’t widely accepted or even recognized. Plus, they move easily through the financial and digital space — the process of “mining” bitcoins demands it; it is all about knowing coding and decryption and how to use an exchange. The sum total of these things — advanced knowledge of computer science, wealth — are also markings of the young, white male.

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But they’re not the only ones who are operating outside of our enshrined banking system. Other groups, the demographic opposites of the Bitcoin crowd, are doing the same. The clinical terminology for those people is the “unbanked” — they rely on informal, instead of formalized, systems of trading or borrowing capital. Why? The unbanked, comprised of women and people of color, are much more frequently turned down for auto loans, mortgages, and investment advice. Or, when they go into formalized systems, the government isn’t there to protect them. Instead, they’re taken advantage of by unregulated banking — unbanked households on average spend over $2,400, about 10 percent of their income, to use services like payday lending and check cashing.

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Bitcoin users reject the premise of a currency backed by the government entirely, while communities of color that participate in sou-sous are simply shut out from the system that exists and still rely on our country’s currency. But the question stands as to why Bitcoin doesn’t reflect the ranks of the unbanked at all. Why isn’t the crypto-currency of the future taking hold among communities other than the elite?

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Bitcoin users’ rejection of the government reflects the luxury of being able to live well without state support,

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the less advantaged desperately need a larger government role in the banking system to help them them overcome deep, systemic bias.

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