Bitcoin Forum

The poll options are pretty self-explanatory, I guess:

8 combinations of ethnicity/gender/age range. (order sloppily randomized)

Please don't get too hung up about the, admittedly crude, distinctions like "white" vs. "non-white", or the binary gender choice, the format of this poll doesn't allow for much nuance.


Why am I asking those questions anyway, you might wonder. Because I believe that we are now still in the early stage of the history of bitcoin in which the wealth distribution is (largely) determined. This phase won't last forever, however. And if bitcoin is anywhere near as successful as many here think it is, bitcoin wealth distribution will eventually become general wealth distribution.

Maybe you can see why I would wonder then, what is the composition of our little group of early investors, speculators and adopters. I have a pretty big hunch what the result will look like, but I'm ready to be surprised.

Thanks for participating, by the way.

Interesting poll. I would have guessed white male between 20-49 ofcourse dominant, but it seems very dominant, confirming we are still in very early adopter phase.

Am I the only Indian guy here?!  8)

their are 2 girls!  :D

One of my eyes started bleeding when I read "their"

Oh well, Indians are honorary whites anyway.


_{I'm kidding, I'm kidding!}

Because of your avatar your probably asian female, under 20.

Total 7 women, that's 10%, not bad. Unless some of them are fat guys living in their parents' basement.
If someone wonders why I have a teddy-bear as avatar, it's because I'm a bear and many women perceived me as a teddy-bear.

Interesting that for men there is a clear dominance of the 20-49 age range, but for women it is reversed.

hmmm ya, i wonder why that is....

That poll confused me so much I clicked on the wrong option >_< organise it better!

should be stuff like:

20 - 29 - White/Male

30 - 39 - White/Male

40 - 49 - White/Male

20 - 29 - White/Female

30 - 39 - White/Female

40 - 49 - White/Female


Oh no, my programming learning has started to infest my posts >_< now I need to correct other peoples formatting on top of their grammar and spelling! I'm a white male in the 20's by the way.

It would be easier to read if they were not randomized. What is the point of randomizing the options?

you're right I am a prostitute

So, everyone who deals with btc is white? I didn't know the Bitcoin Foundation was just a chapter of the KKK....

Though, being as forgiving as I am, I'll consider it just a mistake that you forgot non-whites. :)

LOL that's just an example, I'd end up writing out the whole poll myself it I put in every ethnicity out there and for your information I'm half-Irish motherfucker :P

The point is that there's an obvious answer (male, white, 20-49), but I didn't want the results skewed by the fact that I would order the options by their likely final ordering already.

And what's your other half?

Are you trying to use Irish as an example of non-white?

The pool confused me aswell..

Me too I gave a wrong answer but I'm in the usual suspect group.

Here ya go, bro -- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264649.0

I'm not really surprised; "white" is a blanket for so many different ethnicities, both western and eastern.  I picked non-white, since my mother's native, and I'm often mistaken for philippino, despite my 100% white Santa Clause father.

53 and white male. Which one do I click?

Do a lot of drugs in the disco era? :D

I'm guessing this is your demo: white/male/<20, >49

This make me wonder if the 10% of females is less or bigger in reality.

I'm saying that it's incredibly ignorant to define people as white/black particularly as I'm an artist and understand the concept of there being more than two colours in the world, oh and I'm not colour blind. :P

And yes, I'm half-irish/half-english, there was actually a whole daily show segment on this kind of thing where politics and mainstream media loved to group everyone together in easily definable ways like hispanics or blacks or Europeans and there are many different groups in that group who hate each others guts.

The pool makes me wet

Okay mister wet guy.
I meant the poll  :P

Don't know if you're refering to my poll in particular, but I thought I already addressed that point. Yes, white vs. non-white is incredibly crude and simplifying, bordering on rudeness. At the same time, as this poll so far confirms, it is not without predictive/empirical power.

More precisely, from a, say, biologist's perspective, or that of an artist, white vs. non-white is probably dumb and meaningless. But in an economic context, it is de facto an important distinction. It's kind of sad that it is still a meaningful distinction, but don't blame the messenger for the message.

My entire question was about: who will hold power/wealth in the bitcoin future. Right now, it looks like it'll be predominantly white guys. Doesn't that make you at least the smallest worried or uncomfortable?

Not if the free market we have now stays as it is no :) you should also bear in mind this is an incredibly small poll of only 95 people which doesn't represent the population of the world or even the amount of people using Bitcoin, in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there were just as many or maybe more women/ethnicities because of the pretty anonymous nature of Bitcoin. If everyone's only identity is an address then how can people judge them on their appearance or gender unless they reveal themselves?

Don't fall into the traps that the mainstream media use of thinking that percentages and polls of people in the mere thousands means shit.

It's not about appearance or judgement, but the early adopter demographics, which consistently seems to be dominated by young guys, usually white with a few Asian guys in the mix.

It's been like that during the Internet boom, the dotcom bubble, and I suspect it'll be like that again during the early stages of bitcoin, i.e. now.

Sure, you can say, "what't the problem. us nerds are just quick to adopt new technologies", but I see several problems with this. (a) I personally think diversity/heterognity almost always beats homogenity, and (b) in 20 years from now, when bitcoin is fully accepted (let's say it is), we will probably have to somehow correct for this, similar to how we do now with quotas for female CEO/board members (in the EU) or affirmative action at universities ( in the US)

I think it would be kind of preferable if we could get some more people from outside the core group to join our little experiment now. But I admit, I don't think it's very realistic.

It isn't realistic, you have to realise as well there are some people who just don't care much about this sort of thing, in fact I'm betting that's how most people will feel, I always hear these dumb arguments from rights groups about how the leaders of various organisation etc. 'should' be hiring more of the group they're representing. How? If they aren't interested in doing the job then they're not going to do it well and you can't bloody well force them. This will be a pretty stereotypical example but imagine what one of those really girly stereotypical barbie style girls would say if they were suddenly told they'd should give up the work they prefer and go and work in a steel mill, they'd probably say "Go fuck yourself" or something along those lines.

The "barbie in a steel mill" example is such an oversimplification, it is not really useful in my opinion.

I'm not a huge fan of affirmative action/quotas/etc either, but I'm not entirely against them either.

The ultra-short version of my argument in favor of them would be: (a) for pretty much all throughout history, only men have been recipients of the highest level of education. it is naive to assume that 50 to 100 years after we've opened up the opportunities to everyone, the playing field is level already. (b) even assuming there are inherent differences that make guys more likely to become early adopters of technology, it could be in the best interest of all of society to correct for this -- only to a degree of course, otherwise you'll stifle natural competition too much in all likelihood.

Im a little younger than 20 ::)

there's an option for that. But I guess my idea to randomize the order wasn't that smart after all :/

NSA information collection scheme?

Right. Cause if they are actually capable of doing what people think they are capable of doing, they'd need a poll for that kind of info.

That's probably what an NSA officer would say.

I am a white male 20 - 49 :(

You also have to realize that this is the English section of the forum, if you ran the same poll in the [insert any other language] subsection of the forum you would probably get very different results.


So you are half-white and half-another shade of white. So you definitely fall under the "white" category.

Now, my nephews are half-white and half-Aztec, which category do they fit under? The answer is whichever category they identify themselves with.

I have some real doubts about it. What's the biggest non-English subforum? German? Don't expect too many people that fall out of the core category (I'm German myself, btw).

One thing is true: bitcoin seems to have some success in China. Assuming most Chinese forum member don't post in the English subforum, you're right, they're skewing the results quite a bit.

Ok, I realized that is true after I posted it, if you went to the German/Polish/Russian subforums you would get mostly white. But if you went to the Chinese subforum my guess is most would be non-white. I am not sure about Spanish, do Argentinians consider themselves white?