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Comment by eqmvii | Hacker News Reader

Something I rarely see discussed is the gender breakdown of bitcoin ownership.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 90%+ men mining, trading, and owning bitcoin. If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.

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> If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.

Well, yeah, that's exactly their fantasy too.

The huge transfer of wealth into China (where mining has shifted) is also an interesting economic outcome that doesn't get discussed a lot.

Maybe this is a result of theory that males have a slight bias to tend to like things while females like people relatively more. Or maybe cause of the theory that males tend to be greater risk takers.

(Not saying one sex is better than another, as in different situations, different traits will succeeded. And not saying that all people of a particular sex must take on these traits, but rather only these are tendencies observed in scientific studies.)

I think the simplest explanation is that Bitcoin got popular in internet communities that didn't have many women to start with.

You can say the same replacing "gender" with "profession" and "men" with "computer people".

You can say the same replacing "gender" with "age" and "men" with "young people".

You can probably do the same with multiple other grouping criteria.

> it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.

Just like fiat money.

You can dislike how much fiat the government prints (I do too!), but at least when the government prints money the profit goes towards things that benefit the public (bridges, defense, schools, etc.), some corruption notwithstanding.

I don’t necessarily dislike fiat, I’m just saying that probably the same gender demographics applied to the invention and dissemination of paper money. One example that comes to mind is the Mississippi Bubble. When I read about it most people involved at the beginning were men, but eventually everyone wanted a piece of the action.

What do you see as the barriers for women to participate in bitcoin?

Not that this will explain the large gap entirely, but aren't women generally more risk adverse?

Women are smarter than men.

>What do you see as the barriers for women to participate in bitcoin?

Why do you want to have a discussion involving logic when all I want to do is signal my virtues?

It's against HN's rules to use this site primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that. Flamebait, like the comment you posted here, is particularly against the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sanity and intelligence, mostly.

If you're that concerned you should vote to increase taxe the wealthy. Hell, vote to tax wealth itself.

Then you won't need to worry about things like this as much.

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