Abstract
Bitcoin is an innovative technological network, a new, non-governmental currency, and a worldwide group of users. In other words, Bitcoin is a complex sociotechnical system with a complex set of risks and challenges for anyone using it. We investigated how everyday users of Bitcoin develop trust in Bitcoin on one of the largest online communities devoted to Bitcoin: the Reddit.com r/bitcoin forum. Using qualitative content analysis, we examined how trust in Bitcoin develops based on contributions to this community. On r/bitcoin, trust in Bitcoin is driven by a pervasive ideology we call the "True Bitcoiner" ideology. This ideological viewpoint in centered on the interpretation of Bitcoin as functionally "trustless" and risk-free. Despite widespread evidence of emerging individual and system-level risks with using Bitcoin, participants continue to maintain this ideological perspective. This ideology consists of three primary beliefs: viewing Bitcoin's technology as more trustworthy than its people; rejecting 'corrupt' social hierarchies related to money; and the importance of accumulating or 'HODLing' quantities of Bitcoin as a strategy to create an ideal future. We conclude that this "True Bitcoiner" ideology is maintained despite contradictory evidence in the world because it allows participants to more easily interpret Bitcoin and make decisions by reducing perceived risk and uncertainty in the system. The role of this ideology on r/bitcoin demonstrates an expanded conceptualization of how trust is created and socially-mediated in socio-technical contexts.
- 2019. /r/Bitcoin stats. https://subredditstats.com/r/BitcoinGoogle Scholar
- Marshall Van Alstyne. 2014. Why Bitcoin has value. Commun. ACM57 (2014), 30 32. https://doi.org/10.1145/2594288Google Scholar
- Elli Androulaki, Ghassan O. Karame, Marc Roeschlin, Tobias Scherer, and Srdjan Capkun. 2013. Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 17th International Conference, FC 2013, Okinawa, Japan, April 1--5, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Vol. 7859. Berlin, Heidelberg, 34--51.https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--642--39884--1_4Google Scholar
- Martin W Bauer, Bas Aarts, and George Gaskell. 2000. Corpus Construction: a Principle for Qualitative Data CollectionIn: Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound. Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781849209731Google Scholar
- Dirk G. Baur, KiHoon Jimmy Hong, and Adrian D. Lee. 2015. Bitcoin - Currency or Asset? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2736020Google Scholar
- A. Biryukov and I. Pustogarov. 2015. Bitcoin over Tor isn't a Good Idea. In2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 122--134. https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2015.15Google Scholar
Digital Library
- John Blocke. 2016. A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43Google Scholar
- Rainer Böhme, Nicolas Christin, Benjamin Edelman, and Tyler Moore. 2015. Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance. Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (2015), 213--238. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.2.213Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Jeremiah Bohr and Masooda Bashir. 2014. Who Uses Bitcoin? An exploration of the Bitcoin community. In2014 Twelfth Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust. IEEE, 94--101. https://doi.org/10.1109/PST.2014.6890928Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- J. Bonneau, A. Miller, J. Clark, A. Narayanan, J. A. Kroll, and E. W. Felten. 2015. SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. In 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 104--121. https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2015.14Google Scholar
- Raymond Boudon and Francois Bourricaud. 2002. Ideologies. InA Critical Dictionary of Sociology. Routledge, 221--226.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203199565--41Google Scholar
- Rebecca M. Bratspies. 2018. Cryptocurrency and the Myth of the Trustless Transaction. Michigan Technology Law Review 25, 1 (2018). https://repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr/vol25/iss1/2Google Scholar
- Barry Brown and Eric Laurier. 2017. The Trouble with Autopilots: Assisted and Autonomous Driving on the Social Road. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York,NY, USA, 416--429. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025462Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Christian Büscher and Patrick Sumpf. 2011. "Trust" and "confidence" as socio-technical problems in the transformation of energy systems. (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-015-0063--7Google Scholar
- Jeffrey Carpenter, Connor McDade, and Samantha Childers. 2018. Advice Seeking and Giving in the Reddit r/TeachersOnline Space. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, Vol. 2018. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 2207--2215. https://www.learntechlib.org/p/182831/Google Scholar
- John M. Carroll and Victoria Bellotti. 2015. Creating Value Together: The Emerging Design Space of Peer-to-Peer Currency and Exchange. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). 1500 -- 1510. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675270Google Scholar
- Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone. 2016. Trust & Self-Organising Socio-technical Systems. In Trustworthy Open Self-Organising Systems. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 209--229. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--319--29201--4_8Google Scholar
- Frederick Coleman. 2017. The Dark Side of Bitcoin: Illegal Activities, Fraud, and Bitcoin. https://blog.blockonomics.co/the-dark-side-of-bitcoin-illegal-activities-fraud-and-bitcoin-360e83408a32Google Scholar
- Cynthia L. Corritore, Beverly Kracher, and Susan Wiedenbeck. 2003. On-line trust: concepts, evolving themes, a model. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 58, 6 (2003), 737 -- 758. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1071--5819(03)00041--7Trust and Technology.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Bryan Dosono, Bryan Semaan, and Jeff Hemsley. 2017. Exploring AAPI Identity Online: Political Ideology As a Factor Affecting Identity Work on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2528--2535. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053185Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Vegard Engen, J. Brian Pickering, and Paul Walland. 2016. Machine Agency in Human-Machine Networks; Impacts and Trust Implications. Springer, Cham, 96--106. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--319--39513--5_9Google Scholar
- Jennifer Ferreira, Mark Perry, and Sriram Subramanian. 2015. Spending Time with Money. In Proceedings of the 18thACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15. ACM Press, New York, NewYork, USA, 1222--1234. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675230Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Casey Fiesler and Nicholas Proferes. 2018. "Participant" Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics. (2018). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763366Google Scholar
- Ivan Flechais, Jens Riegelsberger, and M. Angela Sasse. 2005. Divide and Conquer: The Role of Trust and Assurance in the Design of Secure Socio-technical Systems. InProceedings of the 2005 Workshop on New Security Paradigms (NSPW'05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33--41. https://doi.org/10.1145/1146269.1146280Google Scholar
- Claudia Flores-Saviaga, Brian C. Keegan, and Saiph Savage. 2018. Mobilizing the Trump Train: Understanding Collective Action in a Political Trolling Community. (jun 2018). arXiv:1806.00429 http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00429Google Scholar
- Xianyi Gao, Gradeigh D. Clark, and Janne Lindqvist. 2016. Of Two Minds, Multiple Addresses, and One Ledger:Characterizing Opinions, Knowledge, and Perceptions of Bitcoin Across Users and Non-Users. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1656--1668.https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858049Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Eric Gilbert. 2018. The Internet's Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact 2 (2018), 25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274301Google Scholar
- Florian Glaser, Kai Zimmermann, Martin Haferkorn, Moritz Christian Weber, and Michael Siering. 2014. Bitcoin- Asset or Currency? Revealing Users' Hidden Intentions. In European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2425247Google Scholar
- Vlad Petre Gleveanu. 2018. Perspectival Collective Futures: Creativity and Imagination in Society. In Imagining Collective Futures. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 83--105. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--319--76051--3_5Google Scholar
- John Gerard Scott Goldie. 2016. Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age? Medical Teacher 38,10 (oct 2016), 1064--1069. https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2016.1173661Google Scholar
- Gerry Grant and Robert Hogan. 2015. Bitcoin: Risks and Controls. Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance26 (2015),29--35. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22060Google Scholar
- Stan Higgins. 2017. From $900 to $20,000: Bitcoin's Historic 2017 Price Run Revisited. https://www.coindesk.com/900--20000-bitcoins-historic-2017-price-run-revisitedGoogle Scholar
- Gabriel Emile Hine, Jeremiah Onaolapo, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nicolas Kourtellis, Ilias Leontiadis, Riginos Samaras,Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2016. Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan's Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web. (oct 2016). arXiv:1610.03452 http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452Google Scholar
- Matt C Howard and Stephanie M Magee. 2013. To boldly go where no group has gone before: An analysis of online group identity and validation of a measure. Computers in Human Behavior29 (2013), 2058--2071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.04.009Google Scholar
- Joey Chiao-Yin Hsiao and Tawanna R. Dillahunt. 2017. People-Nearby Applications. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW '17. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 26--40. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998280Google Scholar
- Emma Hutchinson. 2014.Researching Forums in Online Ethnography: Practice and Ethics. Chapter 5, 91--112. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042--319220140000013007Google Scholar
- Yongsung Kim, Aaron Shaw, Haoqi Zhang, and Elizabeth Gerber. 2017. Understanding Trust amid Delays in Crowd-funding. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing -CSCW '17. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1982--1996. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998207Google Scholar
- Rob Kling. 2007. What Is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter? The Information Society23, 4 (2007), 205--220.https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240701441556 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240701441556Google Scholar
- Bran Knowles, Mark Rouncefield, Mike Harding, Nigel Davies, Lynne Blair, James Hannon, John Walden, and DingWang. [2015]. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Social Computing.Vancouver, BC, CanadaGoogle Scholar
- Yubo Kou and Xinning Gui. 2017. The Rise and Fall of Moral Labor in an Online Game Community. In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW '17 Companion. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 223--226. https://doi.org/10.1145/3022198.3026312Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Yong Ming Kow and Caitlin Lustig. 2018. Imaginaries and Crystallization Processes in Bitcoin Infrastructuring. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)27, 2 (apr 2018), 209--232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017--9300--2Google Scholar
- Katharina Krombholz, Aljosha Judmayer, Matthias Gusenbauer, and Edgar Weippl. 2017. The Other Side of the Coin:User Experiences with Bitcoin Security and Privacy. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Jens Grossklags and Bart Preneel (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 555--580.Google Scholar
- Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis. 2017.Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Technical Report. Data +Society. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2017/05/apo-nid135936--1217806.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz. 2013. When perhaps the real problem is money itself !: the practical materiality of Bitcoin.Social Semiotics23, 2 (Apr 2013), 261--277. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2013.777594Google Scholar
- Brad McKenna, Michael D. Myers, and Michael Newman. 2017. Social media in qualitative research: Challenges and recommendations.Information and Organization 27, 2 (jun 2017), 87--99. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.INFOANDORG.2017.03.001]Google Scholar
- Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. 2013. A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In Proceedings of the 2013Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). New York, New York, USA, 127 140. https://doi.org/10.1145/2504730.2504747Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Kristina Milanovic and Jeremy Pitt. 2018. The Social Construction of "Shared Reality" in Socio-Technical Systems. In Trust Management XII, Nurit Gal-Oz and Peter R. Lewis (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 149--159.Google Scholar
- Matthew B. Miles, A. Michael Huberman, and Johnny Saldaña. 2014. Qualitative Data Analysis. SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
- Tyler Moore and Nicolas Christin. 2013. Beware the Middleman: Empirical Analysis of Bitcoin-Exchange Risk. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Ed.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg,25--33.Google Scholar
- Tyler Moore, Nicolas Christin, and Janos Szurdi. 2018. Revisiting the Risks of Bitcoin Currency Exchange Closure. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 18, 4, Article 50 (Sept. 2018), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3155808Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008.Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Technical Report. www.bitcoin.orgGoogle Scholar
- Anthony J Onwuegbuzie and Nancy L Leech. 2007. Validity and qualitative research: an oxymoron?Quality & Quantity41, 2 (2007), 233--249.Google Scholar
- Nathaniel Popper and Su-Hyun Lee. 2018. After the Bitcoin Boom: Hard Lessons for Cryptocurrency Investors.Google Scholar
- Jamie Redman. 2019. Former Mod Explains R/Bitcoin Censorship and Why He Was Removed - Bitcoin News. https://news.bitcoin.com/former-mod-explains-r-bitcoin-censorship-and-why-he-was-removed/Google Scholar
- Corina Sas and Irni Eliana Khairuddin. 2015. Exploring Trust in Bitcoin Technology. October (2015), 338--342. https://doi.org/10.1145/2838739.2838821Google Scholar
- William Sattelberg. 2019. The Demographics of Reddit: Who Uses the Site?https://www.techjunkie.com/demographics-reddit/Google Scholar
- Denise Skinner, Graham Dietz, and Antoinette Weibel. 2014. The dark side of trust: When trust becomes a 'poisoned chalice'. Organization 21, 2 (2014), 206--224. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508412473866Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- David Livingstone Smith. 2019. How Media Makes, Ignites, and Breaks Ideology. In Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy, Carl Fox and Joe Saunders (Eds.). New York, Chapter How Media, 183--202.Google Scholar
- Miriam Sobré-Denton. 2016. Virtual intercultural bridgework: Social media, virtual cosmopolitanism, and activist community-building. New Media & Society 18, 8 (Sep 2016), 1715--1731. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814567988Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Shaina J. Sowles, Monique McLeary, Allison Optican, Elizabeth Cahn, Melissa J. Krauss, Ellen E. Fitzsimmons-Craft, Denise E. Wilfley, and Patricia A. Cavazos-Rehg. 2018. A content analysis of an online pro-eating disorder communityon Reddit. Body Image 24 (mar 2018), 137--144. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BODYIM.2018.01.001Google Scholar
- Lana Swartz. 2017. Blockchain Dreams: Imagining Techno-Economic Alternatives After Bitcoin. In Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis, Manuel Castells and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Eds.).Google Scholar
- William H. W. Thompson, Zachary Wojtowicz, and Simon DeDeo. 2018. Levy Flights of the Collective Imagination.(dec 2018). arXiv:1812.04013 https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04013Google Scholar
- Virpi Timonen, Geraldine Foley, and Catherine Conlon. 2018. Challenges When Using Grounded Theory. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17, 1 (dec 2018), 160940691875808. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406918758086Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Gili Vidan and Vili Lehdonvirta. 2019. Mine the gap: Bitcoin and the maintenance of trustlessness. New Media &Society21, 1 (2019), 42--59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818786220Google Scholar
- Paul Vigna. 2019. Most Bitcoin Trading Faked by Unregulated Exchanges, Study Finds - WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/most-bitcoin-trading-faked-by-unregulated-exchanges-study-finds-11553259600Google Scholar
- Kevin Werbach. 2018.The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Index Terms
"The Most Trustworthy Coin": How Ideological Tensions Drive Trust in Bitcoin
Recommendations
Making Sense of Blockchain Applications: A Typology for HCI
CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsBlockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain ...
How "True Bitcoiners" Work on Reddit to Maintain Bitcoin
CHI EA '19: Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAfter the meteoric rise in price, and subsequent public interest, of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, a developing body of work has begun examining its impact on society. In recent months, as Bitcoin's price has rapidly declined, uncertainty and distrust ...
Bitcoin adoption: Scams and anonymity may not matter but trust into Bitcoin security does
CECC 2019: Proceedings of the Third Central European Cybersecurity ConferenceBitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency with more than half of the market capitalization of all more than 2,000 currently existing cryptocurrencies. In recent years, there have been several high-profile hacks and scams that resulted in billions of ...






Comments