Where Are All The Bitcoin Girls?
So there’s been a lot of questions of why women aren’t getting into Bitcoin lately. Besides the fact that upscale fashion malls don’t accept Bitcoin payments yet, women seem to be hesitating to get involved in a geek thing associated with bad news like the Silk Road bust. There are a few “girl geeks” involved, but Dogecoin co-founder Jack Palmer does have a point when he says that cryptocurrencies seem to mostly be the realm of cranky white male Libertarians with half-baked business schemes.
It’s understandable that retailers might put up with the 3% credit card fees for the sake of fraud protection. However, when you consider that credit cards are already making a double-digit interest rate from credit card holders, this begins to look like a racket. No wonder eGifter offers triple points for buying your gift cards with Bitcoin, right? Reward points for using Bitcoin are cool, but the trick is to make cryptocurrencies both easy to use and a really neat branding thing. An online retailer that deals in all things pink could do Bitcoin, Litecoin and especially push the Pinkcoin once the owner has the appropriate working payment buttons. Girly? You bet. The owner of such a retail site might not see very many actual Pinkcoin transactions, but it’ll at least get the attention of women who might not have considered using cryptocurrencies to buy that cute pink pillow.
In fact, maybe the Bitcoin community shouldn’t make it a demographics thing. Bitcoin’s image could be overhauled as something you’d have to be dumber than a Pakled to not be able to use. If you can scan a QR code or carry a paper wallet in your pocket, you can use cryptocurrencies. However, the protocols behind Bitcoin don’t really care if you’re male, female, black, white or have a weird-looking forehead and the community shouldn’t care much beyond what it takes to expand into new markets either. Show those shop managers in that upscale mall how easy it can be to have a cryptocurrency payment terminal sitting beside their credit card reader, explain to them how Bitcoin has built-in protections against fraudulent chargebacks that don’t cost anything and that’ll start sinking into their brains.
This is something that BitPay did try to do with the Bitcoin Bowl. It was a chance for football fans to interact with Bitcoin to buy game tickets and concessions. Considering that the sponsorship was dissolved after only one year and one brilliant game, maybe it didn’t translate into as many transactions as the Bitcoin community had hoped. However, this is the kind of thing that will help reach niches that cryptocurrency champions maybe haven’t considered much. If anyone at that game bought a beer and a hot dog using Bitcoin, they’re going to remember how easy that was.
Making Bitcoin simple to use in everyday life and shopping trips is going to be the ticket when it comes to getting women to use cryptocurrencies as a serious alternative to credit cards. Bitcoin debit cards like the Xapo version are on the upswing. When apps like Apple Pay can go mainstream, BitPay shouldn’t be far behind. However, these apps aren’t very widely known outside of the Bitcoin community and business owners who might have gotten curious about this digital currency that everybody keeps talking about and this can be a problem for spreading Bitcoin into new demographics.
Cryptocurrencies could just be a normal part of life if the cranky white males stop being cranky and start marketing to the places where ordinary people, including women, normally do their shopping. Entrepreneurs who have reported success in integrating Bitcoin without even having to go through a service like BitPay include the owner of a pub in London and the fellow in the video below shows you how to build a DIY Bitcoin Point-of-Sale terminal! (Disclaimer: Make sure you have a geek friend who knows Bitcoin and hardware pretty well available to help before trying.) Make Bitcoin as easy to use as credit cards, help average people to see what’s in it for them and the ladies will get involved even if they don’t particularly care about what goes on under the hood. Then we can just forget about demographics and get on with making cryptocurrencies the way to do business in the modern world.
