Jackson doesn’t neatly fit the image many have of the typical Bitcoin user—the affluent, white, libertarian-leaning male. Jackson isn’t white, and he’s neither an Austrian School devotee nor a card-carrying member of the Seasteading Institute. (“I’m not what you would call an anarcho-capitalist,” he says. “I do believe that government can provide basic rules so that everybody can get along.”) As overall awareness of Bitcoin has grown, African Americans like Jackson might be able to serve as the currency's cultural ambassador to certain minority communities.

From the looks of things, that’s where the currency needs a higher profile. A study conducted in May 2014 by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Massachusetts Division of Banks showed that African Americans are less likely than whites and Hispanics to have heard about virtual currencies in general. Another study, released in July 2014 by the digital media company Morning Consult, found that African Americans are less likely than white and Hispanics to know “a lot” about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin traders might interpret those findings to mean that there isn’t a market for the currency in the black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesn’t believe that’s the case. Having written online commentaries and appeared on cable financial-news outlets, Colas is one of Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal evangelists. He believes the currency would be useful to a variety of demographics. “Bitcoin is a Rorschach test for anybody interested in banking, because different people see different things in what Bitcoin can offer different communities,” he says.

With the African American community, Colas sees the currency filling a significant financial-services void. As support, he cites a Senate committee letter written in 2013 by then-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, along with a Bitcoin primer published by the Chicago Fed. Neither offered any official endorsement of the currency, but both missives noted the possible benefits of facilitating low-cost transactions in communities where currency exchanges, pre-paid cards and payday loan services are prevalent. “That’s where the promise is for the African American community, because in a finished form, it allows for a cheaper money-transfer system than anything that the current financial system can provide,” Colas says.

According to Shawn Wilkinson, the founder of Storj, a cloud-storage service, Bitcoin could enable people to engage in online microloans. “Bitcoin, or some kind of cryptocurrency, has the ability to decouple African Americans from the economic system in a positive manner,” he says. “With Bitcoin, there are a lot more methods with microlending, where you can have communities using cryptocurrencies to help themselves without any intermediaries."



Wilkinson, who became fascinated by Bitcoin in 2012 while studying computer science at Morehouse College, is more interested in the currency as a way of teaching people about how technology works. Beyond microlending, he sees the real value of Bitcoin for African Americans coming from mining the currency—the process of using software programs to solve complex algorithms verifying Bitcoin transactions, which grants Bitcoin to individuals for their efforts. Mining, Wilkinson believes, will influence more African Americans to become knowledgeable about back-end technology.