Why Bitcoin's 'Culture War' Matters

To start with, let me take a position: I stand with those people, especially women, who've lately been calling out maltreatment from members of the bitcoin community and citing rude and abusive behavior as proof of that community's lack of inclusiveness.

These are people who believe in cryptocurrency technology's potential but feel discouraged to believe that they belong to the community's dominant white-male subculture.

They are inherently talking about the wider ecosystem and community gathered around the idea of bitcoin.

Let's equalize the terms, shall we? We can turn each of these nouns into a modifier of the word "Community."

The real issue is that such a hammer community is going to be far less important to the future design and evolution of hammer technology than bitcoin's community is to its.

It struck us that the notion of a bitcoin community was so prominent - the "c" word was always being bandied about - because bitcoin embodied a profound and sweeping social idea.

Money, Felix Martin says, is a social technology, by which he means that its functionality and usability depend far less on the physical qualities of the token that represents it than on the collective agreement among large communities of people that their token captures, represents and communicates transferable value.

The thing about communities is that they inevitably develop cultures.

Inevitably, these cultural features will either encourage or impede the growth of the community.

If the compelling ideas behind permissionless, peer-to-peer exchange and censorship-resistant money that attract people of all stripes to it are to retain those people's interest and grow in influence, the bitcoin community needs to evolve a more inclusive culture.