18 Mar 2014 / National Journal – Pua Pyland’s website looks like many other women’s lifestyle blogs. Pyland, 33, writes about fashion, posts photos of delicious-looking food, and shares parenting tips. But her blog is also very different from its Internet peers in one respect: It’s entirely bitcoin-themed.
“It’s time to chickity check yo’self. Spending Bitcoin is so easy,” Pyland wrote in a post after launching her site, The Bitcoin Wife, last spring. “You can buy some dope things with it, and I’m not talking about [illegal-drug site] Silk Road. I’ve got lots of goodies in store for you from food to fashion to travel. These are exciting times, and the boys shouldn’t get to have all the fun.”
Bitcoin—a virtual currency that was introduced in 2009 and has enjoyed no shortage of press lately thanks to the collapse of one of its exchanges and Newsweek‘s outing of its alleged founder—is, by all accounts, a man’s world. There are no official statistics, but last year, University College London postgraduate researcher Lui Smyth surveyed 1,000 bitcoin users and found that 95.2 percent were male.
Enter Pyland and a handful of other female bitcoin enthusiasts, who are trying to upend this dynamic. Their numbers are tough to quantify; Pyland and another blogger I interviewed struggled to think of similar female-centric bitcoin-lifestyle blogs. But there is a growing community of pro-bitcoin women on Twitter. And a Google+ community for women in bitcoin created last Tuesday night had 23 members by early Wednesday morning, suggesting ready interest.
Pyland’s brand of evangelism is tech-meets-Martha Stewart. A recent post on her site, for example, showed how to make Valentine’s Day boxes for bitcoin paper-wallet gifts. (Paper wallets are used by people who hold the currency to store their bitcoin records offline.) Pyland’s boxes are emblazoned with the bitcoin symbol—a “B” with two lines through it, akin to a dollar sign—and she suggested throwing in a few chocolates, too. “You might not be able to buy love with Bitcoin,” she wrote, “but you can certainly make it a little sweeter!”….. Read more
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/meet-the-bitcoin-mommy-bloggers-20140318
Photo credit: ihavebitcoins.com and thebitcoinwife.com
