Would you rather have one dollar or one bitcoin? That looks like the easiest choice to make, right? Well, not so much. Capital Creators, a YouTube channel that focuses on entrepreneurship conducted a survey with students from the Unversity of Colorado Boulder. The results? A surprising majority would rather have one dollar over one bitcoin!
The question was simple: would you rather I give you one dollar on my hand or the one bitcoin on my phone? To the dismay of anyone who has even the remotest understanding between the values of the two, most of the respondents chose the dollar.
What was most interesting were the reasons the young students gave for choosing the dollar.
“Currently, I only have $0.83 to my name, and so I wouldn’t mind adding onto that. Plus bitcoin is kinda risky. If I had the money to invest, I would invest in something other than bitcoin,” said one.
And that wasn’t even the most interesting response. One student responded, “Definitely the dollar. I’m really hungry and I could use it on the vending machine.”
Other responses included the value of the dollar doesn’t change and the dollar’s value is not dependent on speculation. For one student, he believes that bitcoin’s creator is “a guy in a cave in Antarctica” and he still runs it. Surely, no one wants to bet on a guy in a cave just next to the South Pole.
Education Could Break or Make Bitcoin
Pitiful as it is, the students’ perception of bitcoin can’t be totally blamed on them. Bitcoin, and cryptos in general, are one of the most misunderstood technology globally. There’s a portion of the population which hasn’t heard of cryptos at all. However, the biggest proportion has heard of cryptos, but from the wrong sources.
This generation of young people, in their teens and early twenties, get a lot of their information from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources. On Twitter, the crypto community has been divided into small groups that believe in different cryptos. These factions are always fighting, as we’ve seen between bitcoin, bitcoin cash and bitcoin SV for instance.
And that’s not the worst of it. The rife misinformation available on such media platforms is perhaps the most cancerous. From scam bots that pose as famous people, to click bait sources that look to prey on the gullible, the crypto narrative is chaotic.
As if this wasn’t enough, there are mainstream crypto media sources and their negative coverage of cryptos. While with time the narrative is slowly changing, these outlets have crucified cryptos for the longest time. Hundreds of crypto and blockchain startups are transforming the lives of many users, and yet, it’s the few scammers that the media focuses on.
Educate Someone Today
It’s up to the crypto community to engage those who know very little about cryptos. The narrative that this huge proportion of the population hears first about cryptos is most likely what will shape their view on cryptos. The vloggers, after overcoming their shock that someone could pick one dollar over one bitcoin, took to educating the students they encountered. They talked to them about the value of one bitcoin, how to use it online such as with Amazon, how to sell it for fiat and how to secure it. And as a testament to the effect that misinformation has, the students all chose bitcoin after learning about it.
Educate someone about cryptos today. It’s the only sure way to change the negative perception.