A book offering an analysis of the role bitcoin and cryptocurrency can play with African Americans has been endorsed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as a way for African Americans to see bitcoins potential value to the economic market.
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. The book, Bitcoin & Black America, written by Isaiah Jackson and published last July, analyzes the role cryptocurrency can have in helping a group historically underserved and underrepresented by major financial institutions.
However, Jackson also notes that one of the biggest problems in pushing African Americans to bitcoin is the negative perception African Americans have of cryptocurrency. Jackson wants to change that and wants to help the African American community take advantage of new technologies including bitcoin.
Jackson also wants African Americans to take advantage of blockchain. Blockchain is a spreadsheet containing information on transactions. Each transaction generates a block and each block refers to the previous block, which together makes the blockchain.
“The next wave of innovation is, I believe, centered around blockchain technology and of course bitcoin as a payment system,” Jackson told Anthony Pompliano on the “Off The Chain” podcast. “So when I say ‘miss it’, what I mean is economically. If you want to be viable as a community you have to have some sort of technological expansion to ensure that survival. I think this is one way to do it, not just from a price standpoint (buying bitcoin) but also from a technological standpoint — building the products that we’ll use in the future. That’s what I mean by the black community not missing it this time around.”
Jackson added on the podcast that misinformation coupled with a lack of banking access has made investing in cryptocurrency a challenge among African Americans in the United States. Jackson says this must change going forward.
Earlier this month, Nigeria received its first bitcoin ATM and the bitcoin craze in 2017 lead to many wondering if African American businesses as a whole should invest in bitcoin.