Bitcoin Beauties promotes use of currency by women

Sarah Blincoe wants more women to feel comfortable using bitcoin, so she has created a website where she will post profiles and photos of women she calls Bitcoin Beauties, including Charley, below. Sarah Blincoe wants more women to feel comfortable using bitcoin, so she has created a website where she will post profiles and photos of women she calls Bitcoin Beauties, including Charley, below. Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Bitcoin Beauties promotes use of currency by women 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

At the inaugural Bitcoin Fair, an evening of bitcoin evangelizing held this month in a packed-to-capacity Japantown ramen joint in San Francisco, the absence of one thing stood out.

"I invited lots of women," bemoaned the event host, QuickCoin co-founder Nathan Lands.

They apparently had not accepted.

Sarah Blincoe, founder of the Santa Cruz startup Bitcoin Beauties, wants to address this problem in the bitcoin community, one plainly obvious to anyone who has ever attended a bitcoin conference, Meetup, or even scrolled through bitcoin forums on the Web.

Part of her strategy is to appeal to women through their own beauty. Her logic: Helping women feel beautiful might also help them dive into the emerging digital currency.

"For me to feel empowered and beautiful in a community is really important," said Blincoe, 26.

The company's slogan is "Beauty, Brains, Bitcoin." Its logo is a sketch of two voluptuous, nude women, posing pin-up style beside the stylized bitcoin "B."

The company website, yet to be completed, is now a photo collage of women, some topless, silhouetted against a beach sunset. Blincoe refers to members as "our beauties."

Staking a claim

For Blincoe, there is urgency in staking a claim for women in the highly lucrative world of bitcoin, a crypto currency that by many accounts has the potential to shape the future of how transactions take place and currency flows online.

For now, the main function of Bitcoin Beauties is hosting a small-but-growing weekly gathering where women talk bitcoin. By summer, the goal is to have a website the features profiles of its members, including a photo (shot by Blincoe, also a photographer, on the beach), astrological sign and information such as their "dreams and aspirations" of what they will do with bitcoin. (One member's goal: use her bitcoin to "open a multilevel facility of healing and art.")

The idea, in part, is to establish bitcoin role models - women who are already using bitcoin and what they're doing with it. She has already shot photos of 25 women for the site.

"We're putting beauty into the anonymous bitcoin world," she said. "What I'm doing with Bitcoin Beauties is to go back to really what women thrive on."

If bitcoin will ever go mainstream, attracting women is key.

The fact that women are underrepresented in bitcoin circles is not surprising - they are already underrepresented in both finance and technology. But women seemingly play an even smaller role in bitcoin than in the tech world itself.

A researcher and digital anthropologist at University College London last year found that more than 95 percent of bitcoin users are male. Of the 262 members of the San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup group, about two dozen appear to be women.

"At the moment bitcoin is not easy to use and is seen as super nerdy," said Lander, of QuickCoin. "It's just not cool or useable by regular people yet, and this is likely the underlying problem that is keeping the average woman from engaging with bitcoin."

Groups like Bitcoin Beauties and the Bitcoin Fair, said Lands, can help make the virtual currency "sexier."

"When it's made as easy as paying with a credit card, and is presented in a more fun way that doesn't make it seem like a 'hackers only' type of thing, women will embrace it," he said.

Bitcoin Beauties is not alone in trying to reach out to women specifically.

Barbara Messer recently started BitcoinWoman, a still-in-beta online magazine that aims to combine information on bitcoin with articles on style, art and powerful female bitcoin users.

A different approach

"Women are those who are thinking in (a) broader way, they need (a) different approach, different details must be stressed," said Messer, who is based in Sweden. "Our approach is to give them good, womenish explanations of what bitcoin and other crypto currencies really are."

Like Bitcoin Beauties, the magazine also hopes that providing female bitcoin role models will inspire more women to go crypto.

There is also the blogger Bitcoin Wife ("All things fresh and fabulous in the bitcoin world"), who, among other things, makes bitcoin-shaped sugar cookies.

Stephanie Murphy, a host of popular podcast "Let's Talk Bitcoin," questioned whether posting photos of attractive female bitcoin users is the right approach to expose more women to crypto currency.

"A group that calls itself Bitcoin Beauties - does that attract women or does that attract men?" she said. "At the same time, I guess it takes all types right? I definitely don't begrudge the Bitcoin Wife. She brings a lot of people to bitcoin."

For Blincoe, her interest in bitcoin took off in May, after she attended the Bitcoin 2013 Conference in San Jose. There were "about six" women there, she recalls.

"Bitcoin is my power," she said. "I personally think bitcoin is the most important issue our world faces right now."

She also sees it as a gateway to technology for more women.

"It gives women an entryway into the tech world without it having to be too technical," she said.

At Bitcoin Beauties meet-ups, some women come without "absolutely any idea" of what bitcoin is or how it works. Other members explain the ins and outs of the currency - the difference between private and public keys, how to send and receive it, make purchases, set up a wallet.

The real secret in getting women interested in bitcoin is, like anyone else, helping them understand how it might be relevant to them.

"It's saying, 'Hey, Overstock.com takes bitcoin,' " said Blincoe. "It's about finding who you're connecting to and what's important to them."