“If you’ve never heard of this shit, get your ass on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram right now and go search that shit,” says video blogger Famos Amos in an episode released December 7th, a cloud of pot smoke flowing from his joint. His aim in the video is to enlighten fellow minorities about the future of money as he sees it, which is Bitcoin.
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He comically, if inaccurately, relays the famed pizza incident wherein a man in England, in exchange for 10,000 BTC, called in a pizza order for a man in Florida saying, “the nigga was rich and didn’t even know about it.”
“When Walmart starts accepting Bitcoins, you done fucked up,” says Famos Amos.
He says he feels like a “grandpa” now when counting paper money, and throughout the video implores people to take advantage of the empowering, equalizing nature of the prime cryptocurrency.
“When the white people really, really get on it, you fucked up, man.”
Back in June, rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson accepted Bitcoin as a payment form on his album, “Animal Ambition,” which is indicative of a crossing of lines. “We are excited to see high profile independent artists use Bitcoin and 50 Cent’s trail as an innovator is outstanding,” BitPay CEO Tony Galippi said at the time.
Beyond Privileged Westerners Into Something Truly New
Famos Amos is clearly new to the cryptocurrency space, being that he failed to mention mining, trading, or any coin besides Bitcoin, but the release of this video is evidence of a permeation (finally) beyond a mostly middle and upper-middle-class white phenomenon of privileged westerners into something truly new. The Blockchain is certainly colorblind, and recent moves in Russia and Africa show that, despite the relative age of Bitcoin, things are just beginning.
Comments on the video were very supportive, with at least as much as $50 being tipped through ChangeTip and words like “welcome to the BitCoin family.”
One notable comment from Rodrigo Feher read:
hey nigga, have $1.50 from a white guy from brazil.
Damien De Pra said:
The most convincing but non-technical speech about bitcoin I’ve ever seen ;-)
The tone of the video implies that Famos Amos is afraid that the Bitcoin community is trying to leave minorities behind, and he is doing his part with this video to inform them, which raises questions. Most geeks and highly technical people, while not racist, are not keen on social initiatives whose goal it is to spread the magic of technology to lower classes and minorities. Not for the sake of maintaining a social order or for racist reasons, necessarily, but because it does not rank highly in their priorities. But certainly we all stand to benefit from wider adoption, no matter where it happens the most.
Personally, this reporter has lived in a number of financially repressed communities such as West Baltimore, Maryland and East Oakland, California, and I can imagine a great deal of benefit being derived from the adoption of Bitcoin both by residents and businesses. Other cryptocurrencies with larger quantities still available and even a proof-of-stake coin like Blackcoin could change everything for some people. Despite what various people will say about it, cryptocurrency doesn’t take a great deal of technical knowledge to wrap one’s head around.
It seems there is a movement to obscure and abstract things further with certain recent “innovations,” and this could be seen as an effort to raise the bar to entry. But as it stands, Bitcoin is the people’s currency if there exists such a thing, because its goal is very much not to reinforce the status quo or maintain the dominance of any certain country in the global market. On the contrary, Bitcoin’s very nature is to equalize things in a way never before seen.
What do you think of this new-wave video promotion of Bitcoin? Comment below!
Images from Shutterstock.
