The other night my good friend & fellow cryptoenthusiast Ryan Shea suggested we head to a new Bitcoin meetup neither of us had been to before. I agreed to meet him there, and though the conversation was stimulating, much of the experience was pretty demeaning.

 Image courtesy of TheBitcoinWife.com

 One of the topics that’s been getting a lot of attention recently is that of women in the Bitcoin community.  It’s certainly an underrepresented population, but one that is growing larger by the day.  It has always been my feeling that women will be the key to broader adoption.  While we may not fit the typical stereotypes anymore of housewives and mothers, we do tend to play a large role in household decisions and we do hold a lot of the purchasing power.  I typically am not a big fan of needless consumerism or of promoting it, but I do understand the role it is going to play as the payment system moves further along.  Pretending it doesn’t matter is a fallacy.   We, as women, will play a very large part in the development of the Bitcoin economy and many of us will shape the businesses and services in the sector.

The Black Swan Chronicles:

 An Adventure in Cryptoland by Tracey Leonard

 Let me start off by saying that I am the last person you would expect to find in the world of Bitcoin.  I only started texting a little over a year and a half ago.  I just purchased my first real smart phone.  I’m going to sign up for a plan tomorrow.  I have an online store, but it took me a good 8 months to actually figure out what I was doing with any sort of fluency.  I joined Twitter just a couple of weeks ago on a whim.  I somehow managed to get myself suspended before the first tweet.  I still have no idea why, but I was graciously allowed to come back with no explanation.

There are some lessons in life you can only learn by taking a risk.  Like love.  Or marriage.  Or bitcoin. Or what your Valentine’s Day weekend will look like when you and your wife decide to let bitcoin be your guide. Katie and I are true believers in bitcoin, from the principles of freedom, to the commitment to support the marketplace.  And so when we talked about our 2014 Valentine’s Day weekend, we decided to take a risk.  We would seek out only bitcoin places to do business, and try to have a romantic weekend spending as much of the currency as we possibly could.