Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Roger Ver and Jon Matonis pushed aside now that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream
by
Mike Hearn
on 20/04/2013, 10:26:10 UTC
There's no particular reason there are only 5 people there. There should be more but we wanted the press center to go live as soon as possible in order to try and catch the tail end of this media cycle, and be ready for another one should something dramatic happen and interest flares up again. It's still a work in progress.

Re: who ends up on the site. The initial criteria we used were to find people who would basically stay away from politics and stick to educating journalists about how the system works at a technical and financial level. That's it. Simple as that.

As it happens, I often agree with Jon and have enjoyed Roger's contributions to Bitcoin. But in the end I agreed with the initial version not having them there because the goal is to have people who will be reliably apolitical or, at worst, boringly mainstream.

I'd like the site to evolve over time so that journalists who explicitly want to get the libertarian perspective can easily find such people and nobody will be taken by surprise when their interviewee suddenly starts espousing unusual political views. But it's super important that this clarity exists because the media is an echo chamber - it only takes one or two stories that paint all Bitcoin users as fringe anarcho-capitalists to switch off huge swathes of people who would otherwise consider getting involved.