Why Bitcoin is a currency only for male

Duncan Stewart, director of research at Deloitte Canada, last month noted Google Analytics data showing that almost all – 96.7 per cent – of the visitors to the bitcoin-related Coin Dance website are male. While an unscientific way of measuring the matter, the Coin Dance figures are “backed up by other surveys, attendance at conferences, and my own interviews with millennial investors in North America and Europe,” commented Stewart. “I have been to multiple bitcoin and cryptocurrency conferences, and they have all been around 95 per cent male.”

According to Stewart’s statistics, the Bitcoin industry is dominated by males. This is not surprising, as it is a well-known fact. However, it does confirm the Bitcoin price is male testosterone at work first and foremost. It seems easier to influence male investors when it comes to cryptocurrency. Even though there is no real scientific data to back this up, it’s not entirely impossible either. After all, the entire investment world is mainly dominated by testosterone first and foremost.

The stats are relevant for two reasons, he argued. Firstly, they add weight to the argument that bitcoin is a testosterone-fuelled bubble, driven by animal spirits rather than cracking fundamentals. Secondly, they are a reminder that market bubbles in general may be a male phenomenon.

Stewart recalled his days as a technology fund manager during the 1990s. The more the tech bubble inflated, he said, the more male money managers outperformed their female counterparts. By 1999 and early 2000, male outperformance was “huge”, but that “all reversed” over the following two years as the bubble finally burst, when female money managers were rewarded for their refusal to get carried away by the mania for all things tech.

Sceptics might counter that these are merely anecdotes and that there were many female fund managers who were tech enthusiasts in the late 1990s. Similarly, the world of cryptocurrencies is not an exclusively male domain. Four of the 30 largest initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017 had female co-founders, according to Bloomberg data, with two of the female-led ICOs being among the biggest of the year.