Now, while there are a number of female-centric crypto spaces, Odeniran says females are still underrepresented. “I’ve been in spaces where I’m the only black, or the only woman, or the only black woman,” she says. Odeniran says women need these spaces to participate, but also for solidarity. Spaces where women are in the minority can feel exclusive, or worse, unsafe.
After Siegel discovered After a conference organizer engaged in the harassing tweets, she got a friend to raise the matter again with an acquaintance who worked for the conference. This time she got a response. “I’m sorry this happened at our event,” wrote Justin Doochin, head of events for BTC Inc., “but without this person’s name or email address, we cannot identify them and prevent them from attending future events. ” Siegel wrote back that @bitcoin_fuckboi posted a number of selfies to his account during the event, including with prominent Bitcoin personalities. She also recalled riding the mechanical bull during the conference, which would narrow it down to just a few dozen possible participants.
Meanwhile, David Bailey – the CEO of Bitcoin Inc., the organization leading the Bitcoin conference – responded to the incident on Twitter. @Chairforce, he wrote, was “severely reprimanded, but everyone makes mistakes and I’m not firing them for it.” As for the conference itself, he wrote: “26,000 people attended, don’t let a few bad apples color the community.” One woman replied that women might feel safer if they had clarity about the conference’s code of conduct. “We already have that,” Bailey replied. (Bitcoin conference organizers declined to answer my questions about how it handles harassment or violations of its harassment policy.)
There is no way for Siegel to undo the damage of the harassment she has experienced on Twitter. But she still wants the organizers to take responsibility for what happened while she was there. “People underestimate how scary it is to have a conference that tells you that if something happens, there’s nothing you can do about it,” she says. “The kind of misogynistic jokes you might see on Twitter take on a whole different shape when you’re in the same room as that guy.”
After the conference ended, others started talking about the normalization of misogyny in Bitcoin circles. “On behalf of 100 million bitcoiners, I would like to formally apologize to the roughly 1,000 vociferous bullies who find it difficult to harass women IRL,” one person tweeted. “Those creeps don’t represent us and we don’t like them.” Some people reacted in solidarity; other answers were less encouraging. “Women are for fucking irl, not bullying, wtf bitcoinbros,” wrote a Twitter user named @insiliconot. The tweet got 21 likes.
A blog post also circulated on Twitter, calling for an end to “glorification of rape, misogyny and sexual harassment” within the Bitcoin community. The author, Tom Maxwell, hosts a podcast about Bitcoin; he says he wrote the post after learning what happened to Siegel at the conference. He found her harassment unacceptable, but not surprising. “It was like, here’s another example of this sort of thing going on,” he told me. After he published his blog, some people reacted on Bitcoin Twitter, calling him “beta” or “waste of space”. One person said he should commit suicide.
Maxwell and other Bitcoin advocates are adamant that the toxicity of certain groups does not represent the entire community. But it may be enough to drive some women out of space altogether. The woman who found the AirTag in her purse during Bitcoin Week has since decided to quit a job in the industry due to what she sees as toxicity in the community. Siegel, who entered the crypto space in 2017, says she was looking forward to the community becoming more diverse in recent years. “But I’m afraid if we continue to lean into that culture, we’ll deter these women who get involved,” she says. “We’re going backwards.”
