Stop Telling Me to Buy Bitcoin

Crypto promises Black Americans a different kind of relationship to wealth. But it also depends on a dangerous historical formula.

At first, I was equal parts irritated and confused. My Instagram posts swarmed with cryptocurrency traders marketing themselves. They made claims of astronomical bitcoin profits. I’m the first to admit that as much as I like to play on social media, I am very much an analog Generation Xer. So I decided to do a bit of digging into the decentralized digital currency that is bitcoin. I didn’t get it.

Now I’m starting to understand. These traders claim that they are particularly skilled at making decisions on a daily basis about the market value of digital assets, and they promise high profits. I also noticed that there seems to be a Black-targeted crypto arena on Instagram and that Black people are investing in cryptocurrency at a higher rate than others. In addition to the barrage of messages underneath my posts, there are people I know in the flesh who have implored me through Instagram messaging to sign up with their traders. I believe they are well intentioned, but I haven’t ever heard them talk about how high-risk and speculative crypto is, or how volatile, which means it is easier to become ruined than rich through it.

I do understand the particular appeal of crypto to Black people. It promises an accessible form of investment and wealth production, one that likely seems especially attractive to people who have been historically excluded from investment because of both racial discrimination and economic vulnerability. The idea of getting rich quick on crypto might seem like it could turn the tables on race and wealth.

And boy, does it feel like those tables must be turned. It is well understood by now that social media is a site of cultural extraction when it comes to Black people. African American dance, music, and speech patterns are globally popular and therefore lucrative on social-media platforms. And both performers and media companies get ideas from the content created by Black users.

With each new social-media hub, we enter a renewed conversation about the twin structures of racial exploitation in U.S. history: culture on the one hand, and physical and intellectual labor on the other. Of course, these two categories are intertwined. But the particular marketability of Black culture as a source of entertainment always registers as both ironic and cruel given how much Black people are saddled with the idea that we are culturally inferior in so many ways. A great deal of money is made from the fruits of our alleged deficiency.

Crypto is appealing, I would guess, because it promises Black users of social media a different kind of relationship to wealth, one of accumulation rather than exploitation. But it also depends upon an older formula. Because crypto investments are so volatile, they are most risky to the most vulnerable. It is reminiscent of the dangers of subprime-mortgage lending and, before that, a history of banks targeting Black people for bad investments in life insurance and business loans, as well as housing.

Instagram is a place where potential bitcoin investors are mined. And that insidious metaphor is at the heart of the whole enterprise. Bitcoin mining is a computerized, computational process where those who are referred to as miners compete with one another to add new financial transactions. It is so intensely competitive that sophisticated computer equipment and a lot of electricity are necessary to succeed. And that’s where mining goes from metaphor to legacy. In places where coal mines once were, bitcoin mines are being built, especially in Kentucky, where the state has incentivized bitcoin miners to come and set up operations. This is an environmental hazard, and a reminder that even when money isn’t tangible, it can still cost the Earth.

Crypto costs people too, with its seductive possibilities and its unreliable results. It reminds me of the Hawks Nest disaster in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1930. Workers were charged with blasting through Gauley Mountain so that water might be diverted to a hydroelectric plant for Union Carbide. Close to 3,000 men were enlisted in the project, and the majority of them were previously unemployed and Black. Without proper safety precautions and equipment, the excavation released silica dust into the air, and it traveled into the lungs of the workers. The project was completed. But the men died of silicosis at an astronomically high rate, most of them Black. It was a tragedy for all involved workers, but that tragedy was unequally distributed. It was shaped by circumstance. Hawks Nest is one of many examples that give truth to the saying “When white America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu.” Risk is racialized, and has been for a very long time.

I expect that will prove to be the case with the crypto appeals on Instagram as well. And so I steadily delete and block them. Total clarity about crypto is elusive for this analog woman, but I do know that my skepticism is warranted.