By David Futrelle
A couple of days ago, ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman tweeted out some advice on a hitherto unacknowledged peril of dating for (at least mostly) straight women in our digital age: when the seemingly normal dude you’re having coffee with suddenly, and for seemingly no reason, brings up Bitcoin.
While there were many Tweeters who seconded this advice, some of them mentioning their own Bitcoin date nightmares, not everyone who replied to Huseman agreed with what seems to me to be her eminently sensible dating advice.
“Is [the] goal to screen out passionate men working on one of the most important technologies of the next generation,” asked one fellow.
Er, yes?
“#Bitcoin bros deserve better, and by the time she realises this he’ll be unattainable for her,” warned another.
There were even some women standing up for the Bitbros — one of them going so far as to write an entire article about it for Bitcoinist, a website that seems to be devoted to constantly mentioning Bitcoin in any and all circumstances.
Christina Comben, whose articles for the site generally sport headlines like “TOP 5 CHEAPEST COUNTRIES TO MINE BITCOIN” and “3 REASONS WHY BITFINEX LEO TOKEN HAS FLOPPED” decided she needed to reassure the men in her audience that some ladies actually like cryptocurrency and the bros who talk about it on first dates.
After acknowledging that the Bitcoin community is pretty much a sausagefest — with only 5% of those in the business being female, according to one source — she plaintively assured the fellas that “NOT ALL WOMEN DISLIKE BITCOIN.”
“Don’t worry guys,” she wrote,
if bitcoin is your thing, it isn’t completely game over. Some women actually said they quite like it.
Her evidence? A handful of crypto-gals replying to Huseman on Twitter.
Comben then delved into the enigma that is Jessica Huseman: Woman Who Doesn’t Care to Hear About Bitcoin. “[A]lthough she seems to hate Bitcoin,” Combed wrote, seemingly baffled by Huseman’s existence, “she appears to be an extremely intelligent lady.”
Huseman, for her part, was considerably more delighted by Comban’s article than she is by cryptodudes on dates.
She now quotes the bit about being “an extremely intelligent lady” in her Twitter bio.
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I’ve never been on a date with any bitcoin fans, but thanks for the warning. Is this a common date issue nowadays?
I’ve gotta say, I’ll give a bitcoin bro a second date if they bring it up as just one part of conversation. If it’s the only thing they talk about, yeah, probably a deal breaker, but if they’re a nerdy enthusiast and that’s one of the things they’re enthusiastic about? That’s fine.
Jeebus. It’s probably bad enough that these guys will have entire political treatises on how to split a bill on a date without them then yanking out a computer and saying “Hang on; just a couple of hours of mining should do it!“
It’s a no win situation. If women did go after Bitcoin bros, I can guarantee that instead these men would be complaining about hypergamy.
I still have no sympathy for bitcoincels. If you can’t talk about something other than bitcoin, you aren’t worth my time. Also, it’s a big red flag that they’re into other libertarian BS.
@Alexis Filth
I feel similar, in that I’m not sure it’s an instant dealbreaker. Though if it’s the main thing they’re interested in, I’d see it as a red flag for incompatibility, same as I would if they were into guns or any other libertarian favorite.
Okay. here’s a thing in which, I dare say, we have complete equality between the sexes.
Because were I on a first date with a hopefully compatible lady, and she decided that the proper way to establish the tone of the date was to start lauding BitCoin (or, to be fair, any pseudocurrency), I’d tend to think twice about asking for, or accepting another one myself. Not quite date discussion material to my mind any more than to Ms Huseman’s.
When I was in high school it was the importance of returning to the gold standard. Some things never change.
If they casually mentioned it, I wouldn’t be alarmed. But if it’s an obsession, then yeah that’s a red flag. The only people who have mentioned bitcoin in my circle are my women friends who love to make investments. I’m too conservative to bite since crypto currencies strike me as shaky.
@Hippodameia
I’ve heard that one a few times. Ironically, it’s the same kinds of people who want both cryptocurrencies and gold standard. You can’t have both, people!
There is nowhere near enough gold on the world to return the world economy to the gold standard, so I don’t even think it would be possible to return.
I’d say that a bitcoin bro is less undateable than an Ayn Rand fanboy, but there’s probably quite a lot of overlap there.
Yeesh, this reminds me of trying to dodge a blockchain in distributed systems projected this term. Social nightmare to an introvert like me, and I ended up taking a “knowledgeable-person” reputation hit that I didn’t deserve (as if I would think Ad Hoc Networks was either a top tier conference or focused on distributed systems! Humph!). But I successfully dodged the blockchain projected. Blockchain is my kryptonite.
It’s just as important a rule for academic projects as dating: never get involved with the blockchain people.
“Overlap” is also my understanding. Fortunately, however, I don’t actually know any bitcoin bros and my exposure to Randians was limited to very passing experiences with a couple people in law school. (No law school is very big, so you can’t entirely escape them, but we didn’t have common interests so I spent hardly any time with them).
Beware, there are lots of sealions in the cryptocurrency/blockchain community.
Bitcoin is Shitcoin, and bitbros are shitbros. I’d as soon date a Scientologist or a Moonie as one of them.
And for about the same reasons, too.
I think the only contexts in which I’ve ever heard of bitcoin are:
1) as the punchline to a joke, or
2) as the reason video card prices spiked to ridiculous levels for a while.
And I think those might the only safe reasons to bring up bitcoin on a date.
(The fact that mining bitcoin incentivizes otherwise useless expenditure on electronics hardware means it isn’t an environmentally safe currency, and honestly that’s my biggest problem with it. Other than that… let libertarians libertariate, I guess.)
> I still have no sympathy for bitcoincels.
fincels
It seems to me that all Huseman was saying was that no one likes the sort of person who wants to talk and not listen, and she’s noticed that that trait is correlated with enthusiasm for bitcoin.
The response “She hates bitcoin–yet she doesn’t seem dumb! How can this be?” does seem like the response that someone who doesn’t want to listen would make.
@Definitely not Steve:
Steve, that’s not the biggest environmental problem with bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is literally designed to waste energy as “proof of work”, and, globally, the total energy consumption of bitcoin mining is comparable to the energy consumption of a mid-sized country.
Thanks for weighing in. I’ll try harder to think of Bitcoin bros as attractive.
I would guess that the overlap between people who talk about bitcoin on the first date and the people “working on” bitcoin is actually very small. As a rule of thumb, the noisemakers are not the ones that do the work.
As a guy who would casually mention stuff even more obscure than blockchain/bitcoin, I’m really not surprised. Jessica Huseman and Alyssa Bereznak[*] could probably be BFF’s
[*] https://gizmodo.com/my-brief-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-th-5833787
Well, at least I can be pretty sure that none of us are going on dates with the last bitcoin bro we looked at. I am talking, of course, about the fellow calling himself Lord Tulips de Medici.
I can understand why someone would be interested in bitcoin/blockchain. I cannot understand why they think anyone else would want to hear about it.
If the way you act on a date is comparable to the way you act here, the issue is you being tedious and sexist, not your dates being too shallow to appreciate whatever obscure thing you like to bring up.
Blockchain is fascinating math, and studying how it works and what it can do is quite valuable.
Currencies based on blockchain solve the problem of what if you can’t trust *any* central authority anywhere.
If that becomes an issue to a substantial number of people, the question arises: who’s running the global network and the power grid anymore?
Zimbabwe is a good example what to do if your own currency collapses: you just use someone else’s. It needs to be a much bigger collapse before you stop trusting any governments or large institutions at all.
> not your dates being too shallow to appreciate whatever obscure thing you like to bring up
It’s hard to verify: too many obscure stuff, too little dates. I haven’t even tested Toxic Avenger movies as a talk subject on a date… bummer.