Every once in a while — most recently with the collapse
of online exchange site Mt Gox — the world starts paying attention to
Bitcoin, the hacker-project-cum-digital-currency that has garnered the
love of a certain subset of people on the internet. Who are those
people? 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.
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.” On the last point, the
political ideology of Bitcoin users is evident from the fact that the whole idea behind Bitcoin is that it segregates economic markets and currency from a country’s government. Bitcoin aims to be a universal currency, connecting people “peer-to-peer” instead of through set institutions. It wants to replace
our current economic system and practices in their entirety — changing
the way we buy goods and distribute money. The libertarians, or
anarcho-capitalists as the case may be, don’t trust the government to
handle their money. They’re the same people who want to “end the fed.”
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.
