I’m just starting the journey and open to any pointers!
It dawned on me last night at Denver BitDevs that we had 30 men and 2 women in the room learning Bitcoin… and that’s a problem.
It took time for more female engineers to enter the workplace but it’s become much more commonplace and I’ve worked with incredible female engineers over the years.
why is that a problem?
is anyone or anything stopping them from participating?
Network effects for starters.
Show me one successful network or governance structure that is better by being vast majority men.
I don’t see the problem as barrier of entry per say.
And I don’t have a well researched thesis on this, just empirical evidence from a few meetups I’ve attended in person and years on Bitcoin Twitter.
#[2] do you think it’s not a problem? And if so curious why?
I don't think that's a problem, no. I'm sure (I know) there are tons of woman users.
Certainly as far as "governance" goes the network makes no distinction between men or women.
Bitcoin users contribute either code or capital. Both are gender agnostic.
There are also a great group of gals doing fantastic stuff already. Several top contributors at every level are women across the ecosystem.
I think if it is a problem then they are the ones doing the very best to increase women representation via the work that they do.
I’m not saying there aren’t a great groups of gals doing fantastic stuff, that there aren’t already female users, or that the work they do isn’t inspiring or serving as role models for other #women…
I’m only stating there are MUCH fewer of them than men. And that’s a problem because we’re slowing the Metcalfe’s Law network effects curve by having vast under-utilization of 50% of the global population. So there is work to do.
And when I used the term governance it was too loosely. I wasn’t referring to Bitcoin’s network governance specifically… I understand nodes and miners are machines and not people (even though those nodes are run primarily by men I would bet). Rather I was talking about governance in general… ex: corporate executives, business owners, public officials, etc (more women over the years, but still majority male)
I know it’s a common trope but Metcalfe’s law really has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
While they may be under-represented in the “community” (that loose concept we define as people at meetups or on Twitter) I see no strong evidence that this has any effect on slowing down Bitcoin’s general adoption 🤷🏻♂️
Fair enough. Can we switch gears then and elaborate on Metcalfe’s law having nothing to do with Bitcoin? First I’ve heard this.
Wealth is not evenly distributed.
Nodes on the network aren’t either.
Metcalfe’s law is a very specific model which people often use as some sort of soundbite when they really just mean network effect.
In reality Bitcoin does not even have the concept of a “users”. There are addresses, UTXO and associated capital.
It’s all pseudonymous therefore attempts to model adoption is a bit of a fool’s errand
