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The digital currencypopular among a mostly white, mostly libertarian contingentmight prove useful in communities where it's relatively difficult to secure a loan or transfer money.

Lauren Giordano/The Atlantic

Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currencywhen he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a newly-discovered oil reserve in his backyardhe loves trading it and tracking its movement in the markets.

In 2013, Jackson, a 39-year-old Las Vegas-based pro poker player and former writer for Upworthy, started spreading the gospel of the currency via his blog, Blacks in Bitcoin, where he claimed that he would spontaneously combust if he had no other outlet to voice his obsession with the digital barter.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to own a piece of email technology in 1994? asks Jackson, who believes the currency is still very much in its early adoption phase. Thats what Bitcoin is like right now, and its only getting bigger. While it's still being debated whether Bitcoin will ever gain a full foothold in the global financial ecosystem, there has been less discussion about the currencys potential effects within communities that arent well served by traditional financial services. Bitcoins promise in the African American community has been especially overlookedmore time has been spent worrying that the currency would facilitate criminal activity.

Jackson doesnt neatly fit the image many have of the typical Bitcoin userthe affluent, white, libertarian-leaning male. Jackson isnt white, and hes neither an Austrian School devotee nor a card-carrying member of the Seasteading Institute. (Im 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, thats 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 isnt a market for the currency in the black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesnt believe thats 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. Thats 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."

Read more:
Why Are So Few Black People Using Bitcoin?