Bitcoin or t-shirts? Will the real alternative currency please stand up?

Originally published on Tumblr.

Why is everyone talking about Bitcoin? Anyone who’s paying attention knows that t-shirts, not Bitcoins, are the real currency of the tech community.

This isn’t my idea. One of my co-founders, (Rich Newton)[http://www.richard-newton.com/] came up with it. He runs our marketing department, and he constantly reminds me that giving away cool OP3Nvoice t-shirts is important. I’ve listened, and I think he’s right.

My interest in cool t-shirts started with NeXT, one of Steve Jobs’ idea factories. When I bought my first NeXT machine — I don’t know why we never called them “computers”, but we never did — it shipped with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and a t-shirt. Owning and wearing that t-shirt meant a lot. It meant a lot to geeks, and it even meant a lot to non-geeks.

I bought that first NeXT machine in 1989. A few years later, a friend of mine – a journalist, not a techie – asked me if I’d give it to him. It was well-worn, and he was a good friend, so I did. Then I forgot about it.

Last year, my son stayed at my friend’s house, and a few months later he showed up at my office wearing that t-shirt. It was a wreck. Full of holes. But he was proud of it. Proud of a 25 year old t-shirt with the logo of a computer brand that no longer exists.

Wow.

Since I’m in the software business, I come in contact with a lot of other tech companies. I love being given a t-shirt. I especially like when it’s a personal gift. And if it’s a special edition, I like it even more.

But even a special edition shirt given to me by the CEO won’t make it into my normal rotation if it’s ugly, so the design matters a lot. Getting into that rotation is difficult. It’s very competitive.

Ugly t-shirts never make it to the drawer. Nice looking marketing shirts might make the bottom of piles, and they’ll bubble up occasionally. But only special shirts get regular attention. And these days I wear one of our company’s shirts every other day. I like our shirts, not only because they’re ours, but because they look good. And we produce special editions. In fact, we produce several levels of special edition.

We have employee-only special editions, and we even have a CEO special edition. That one is fluorescent orange, and I like it so much that I don’t think even my best friend will end up with it.