Blockchain Papers

Bo Tang, Yang You, YuLin Zhong

No abstract is available for this record.

Pepper D. Culpepper, Taeku Lee, Ryan Shandler

Abstract This article advances the literature on media effects by examining how contrasting partisan narratives influence support for regulation after a real-world corporate scandal. Using both multi-wave observational and randomized experimental data, we show that self-selected media exposure and experimentally assigned information shape public opinion in distinct ways. While scandals are narratives of regulatory failure, partisan media environments differently attribute blame for that failure. In two separate observational waves, only Democrats exposed to news about the FTX bankruptcy increased their support for crypto regulation. In the experiment, only Republicans shifted in favor of regulation. Research on media effects needs to take into account not only media content, but also the partisan information environments that expose citizens to that content.

Romain Rossello, Stefano Balietti, Stefan Kitzler, Pietro Saggese

No abstract is available for this record.

Radu Lupu, Paul Cristian Donoiu

This study provides empirical evidence that cryptocurrency market movements are influenced by sentiment extracted from social media. Using a high frequency dataset covering four major cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Ripple) from October 2017 to September 2021, we apply state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques on tweets from influential Twitter accounts. We classify sentiment into positive, negative, and neutral categories and analyze its effects on log returns, liquidity, and price jumps by examining market reactions around tweet occurrences. Our findings show that tweets significantly impact trading volume and liquidity: neutral sentiment tweets enhance liquidity consistently, negative sentiments prompt immediate volatility spikes, and positive sentiments exert a delayed yet lasting influence on the market. This highlights the critical role of social media sentiment in influencing intraday market dynamics and extends the research on sentiment-driven market efficiency.

Sami Ben Jabeur, Zouhaier Dhifaoui, Yassine Bakkar, Houssein Ballouk

This study provides evidence on the role of the quality of political signals in predicting six major cryptocurrency asset classes. Including communications from the U.S. presidential election in 2024, we find that political news affects cryptocurrency returns in the short-term (from ∼ 2 to ∼ 4 months). For most cryptoassets, text sentiment measures demonstrate superior predictive performance compared to historical cryptocurrency time series in out-of-sample forecasts. • Analyzes the effect of political signals on cryptocurrency returns. • Political news influences cryptocurrency returns in the short term. • Political signals enhances the accuracy of Bitcoin return forecasts.

Shane Littrell, Casey Klofstad, Joseph E. Uscinski

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset secured by cryptography that has become a popular medium of exchange and investment known for its anonymous transactions, unregulated markets, and volatile prices. Given the popular subculture of traders it has created, and its implications for financial markets and monetary policy, scholars have recently begun to examine the political, psychological, and social characteristics of cryptocurrency investors. A review of the existing literature suggests that cryptocurrency owners may possess higher-than-average levels of nonnormative psychological traits and exhibit a range of non-mainstream political identities. However, this extant literature typically employs small nonrepresentative samples of respondents and examines only a small number of independent variables in each given study. This presents the opportunity for both further testing of previous findings as well as broader exploratory analyses including more expansive descriptive investigations of cryptocurrency owners. To that end, we polled 2,001 American adults in 2022 to examine the associations between cryptocurrency ownership and individual level political, psychological, and social characteristics. Analyses revealed that 30% of our sample have owned some form of cryptocurrency and that these individuals exhibit a diversity of political allegiances and identities. We also found that crypto ownership was associated with belief in conspiracy theories, "dark" personality characteristics (e.g., the "Dark Tetrad" of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism), and more frequent use of alternative and fringe social media platforms. When examining a more comprehensive multivariate model, the variables that most strongly predict cryptocurrency ownership are being male, relying on alternative/fringe social media as one's primary news source, argumentativeness, and an aversion to authoritarianism. These findings highlight numerous avenues for future research into the people who buy and trade cryptocurrencies and speak to broader global trends in anti-establishment attitudes and nonnormative behaviors.

Hafize Nurgül Durmuş Şenyapar

This study delves into the dynamic landscape of public sentiment surrounding cryptocurrency through a comprehensive social media discourse analysis. Employing the Python Selenium library, data from 1000 public profiles across major platforms—X, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—were systematically collected. Using advanced text-mining techniques in R Studio, sentiment analysis was conducted with the ‘Syuzhet’ package and word frequency analysis via the ‘tm’ package. The results unveiled a nuanced emotional landscape characterized by dominant sentiments of anticipation and positivity, interwoven with expressions of negativity, notably anger, and loss. Word frequency analysis highlighted vital themes such as established cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum), blockchain technology, and practical and financial aspects of cryptocurrency usage. The study illuminated technical interest, financial speculation, and reactions to regulatory and economic developments. Offering insights crucial for stakeholders, including investors and policymakers, this research contributes to the academic understanding of public sentiment, emphasizing the volatile nature of crypto-currency markets and the transformative potential of blockchain technology and calls for ongoing monitoring of public sentiment to inform policy, investment, and technological innovation in the ever-evolving cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Noortje Marres

Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, 2000). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of representation, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an interactive one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society. The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., 2015, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.1 This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more fundamental phenomenon: that “choice” in online platform settings is socio-technically constituted in a highly distinctive way, involving clicks on links that are dynamically served up by the platform based on social network analysis, among others. This type of “choice” presents a very different form of action as compared to say, choosing what article to read in a paper newspaper. However, and this is the key point, affirming such ontological complexity would no doubt be seen as reducing the “strength” of the explanation offered. As the recently deceased constructivist sociologist Aaron Cicourel (1964) pointed out many decades ago, to draw attention to the participation of the underlying apparatus of social research - in this case, Facebook data categories such as “clicks” and “friends” - in the construction of social reality is to challenge the representational understanding of social science in general and of explanatory social science in particular. Explanation requires the relation between social categories and social reality to be stable and one-way (unidirectional): it requires that social scientific categories first and foremost refer back to social reality. When the apparatus of social research is shown to interfere in the realities it purports to measure, it is clear that this does not quite obtain. A persistent problem with explanation, then, is that its validity seems to depend on the bracketing, externalising or trivialising of dynamics of reflexivity. If the proponents of the idea that “social science is explanation, or it is nothing” would get their way, and social science indeed would offer only explanations, and nothing else, this would surely end up restricting our capacity to interrogate the manifold ways in which social categories interact with social realities. However, most people who are interested and/or trained in sociology are well aware of the phenomenon of reflexivity, of the power of social categories to shape social reality. So why do so many sociologists today favour explanation over other, more open-ended forms of knowledge, like ethnographic description and theory-driven interpretation, methodologies which have been specifically designed to enable interrogation of the interactive relations between social categories and social realities (Krause, 2016)? I would like to argue here that there is another layer to this phenomenon of interactivity, one that has less to do with how norms, categories and methods shape reality, and more with how social science achieves what Norbert Elias (2011) called adequacy to social reality. For me, there is a danger that lurks in the commitment to “explanation” that is related but different from the problem that it legitimates or encourages indifference to reflexivity, the danger namely that it distracts from a key task and purpose of social science: articulation. The slogan “explanation or nothing” makes me think of a remark by the German media scholar Erhard Schüttpelz who once reminded me that “all of our concepts are going downhill all of the time.” At the time, we were speaking about the concept of “media bias,” and the ways in which understandings of such bias developed in the 1970s are no longer adequate, though still highly relevant, to today's digital society with its algorithmic organisation of content, where frames are consolidated through post-discursive, automated, processes of selective circulation. I continue to find Schüttpelz comment helpful more generally speaking, as it draws attention to a brute fact that deeply affects the relation between the social sciences and society, which is that the world, society, is continously changing, and this changing world continuously renders our existing vocabularies, and forms of explanation, deficient. In other words, we should expect our existing social theories to be losing their adequacy to our present social reality. Schüttpelz slogan reminds us that many of the phenomena that it is our job to understand are invisible or badly named, and are difficult to even observe let alone measure. Take the example of the security state, which in its current technological form - which is marked by the deployment of a data-intensive apparatus of monitoring and control - developed in the post-war period, from the 1960s onwards. As the French sociologist Dominique Linhardt (2008) has shown, the very observability of the security state during this period was dependent on targetted interventions in society: it partly depended on the interventions of militants such as the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany and Provo in the Netherlands whose demonstrations brought the police out onto the streets for all to see. It was these interventions that rendered the phenomeon of the security state publicly visible, putting the repressive apparatus of the state monitoring activists onto the front pages of newspapers. But the observability of this type of information-based security state also depended on the invention of a new kind of sociology, which had to rework its concepts of power, in order to be able to demonstrate the significance of the technological security apparatus to the structuring of wider societal relations between population and state during this period. The point is, in a case like this, it is clear that both a phenomenon in society - the security state - and the categories we use to understand this and associated phenomena - state power - underwent transformation during that relevant period. This is not a context in which “explanation” works very well. To “explain” the security state requires the very phenomenon to be observable and identifiable in the first place, and a lot of work has to be done before we get to that point: the work of articulation. If we go along with Erhard Schüttpelz and recognise that events in the world render our ways of knowing deficient all the time, then it is clear that our work as sociologists must be re-constructive, we will need to be able to revise and rethink our categories, so we remain capable of naming phenomena in the world adequately, so that we can make them count. To give another example from my own field: when in the 1980s feminist technology studies developed the notion of “invisible labour” through fieldwork studies in workplaces like airports and offices (Star, 1991; Suchman, 1996), they transformed the wider concept and understanding of innovation. At the time, innovation was a restrictive notion - and it still is - which allocates a disproportionate amount of agency to the engineers who create technology, while defining the rest of us, workers and consumers, as more or less passive “users.” Feminist studies of invisible labour in technology-mediated work used ethnographic description to demonstrate how often female workers accomplished tasks - performing flight checks, copying documents - that were later acribed to the smooth running of “technology.” It was these descriptions of invisible labour that allowed this phenomenon to be named and defined. Only then could the work begin of incoporating sensibility to unrecognised work into the social study of innovation and its “apparatus of explanation,” and gain the efficacy it has today, for example, in the form of a critical exposé of the invisible labelling that workers in Kenya, India and other countries perform, so that “generative AI” can do well at image recognition (Catanzariti et al., 2021). To emphasise articulation as a key task and purpose of social inquiry is certainly not to imply that explanation is without value. Finding ways to measure the prevalence of invisible labour in society so as to be able to demonstrate its existence, explain its workings, and connect its persistence with wider underlying dynamics in the technological economy, is crucial. The problem, that is, is not with explanation as such, it is with the “or nothing” bit in the slogan above. The adequacy of our explanations to the world is dependent on the prior work of articulation, and it is this dependency that is at risk of being disregarded when it is suggested that explanation is all we need. An important part of the task of social science is to develop vocabularies, formulate categories, cultivate sensibilities, so as to render ever-changing phenomena in society observable, explorable, and communicatable. To name, to formulate, to label, takes us halfway to understanding. It is to draw what Alfred Schutz (1970) calls the “isohypses of relevance,” enabling some entites, some dimensions to stand out, to gain traction, in our engagement with the world, while submerging others. This is the work of articulation, as opposed to explanation. Without it, our explanatory apparatus will not just keep going down hill. Its adequacy will eventually be lost. There is an odd irony in the suggestion that sociologists should today consider putting all their eggs in the basket of “explanation.” We are living at a time in which the natural sciences are finally beginning to come to terms with the interactivity of science, as they grapple with the Anthropocene. Today, more and more colleagues in the natural and technical sciences are gripped by the realization that science has intervened in and indeed harmed and damaged the world in ways to which scientific epistemology previously rendered scientists blind. Representationalism places on science the methodological requirement to regard as external to the scientific mission - which is to represent reality - how its apparatus of representation impacts the world. Representationalism is part of what enabled scientists to cultivate indifference to how their work transformed the world physically, socially, materially, environmentally: think of the stress experienced by lab animals and lab technicians (Friese & Latimer, 2019); the PFAS molecules which are today found in ground and sea water, and known to cause cancer, and which for decades were represented in terms their qualities of “water-proofing” and “stick-resistance” (for carpets). There is a more complex story to be told here about the relation between science and innovation, but the problem is similar to the problem of methodologically ordained dis-interest in socio-technical complexity that I mentioned in the introduction. Damaging effects produced by the apparatus of scientific research on the world used to be referred to as “unintended consequences,” but they are today understood by an increasing number of natural scientists as a siginificant factor in the degradation of nature, animal and human life. Isn't it odd that at the very time that scientists are beginning to recognise interactivities between science and the natural and social world, we are debating whether the primary role of the social sciences is to represent the world? Why? Why would a sociologist today accept that “explanation” is the only serious game in science, at a time when the sciences themselves are finally waking up to the manifold problems with “explanation” as a scientific framework? Granted, one of the benefits of “explanation” is that it has a strong “theory of change” associated with it. Explanation offers us a tight, sequential relation between knowledge and action, whereby the representation of an underlying reality creates the basis for transformative intervention in society, for social change. By comparison, a theory of knowledge that puts articulation centre stage offers a far more contingent, multi-factored and messy view of how change happens in the world, and it requires an openness of inquiry to engage and continually attune understanding to a changing social world. My sense is that it is the strength and simplicity of the associated theory of change that the methodological paradigm of “explanation” promises, that explains much of its attractiveness to sociologists today. Perhaps it can be seen, too, as a response to the utterly restrictive expectations that are placed today on the social sciences. Explanation is able to offer knowledge of long-term processes and enduring underlying causes, which is badly needed in the face of muliplying social, environmental and political crises. It offers a robust alternative to the instrumental conception of social research, which is increasingly imposed on us by state and industry, and which requires that social science delivers on short-term policy needs and value for money, and which can seem to value knowledge of society only to the extent that it is able to produce demonstrable changes in behaviour and bottom-lines (Kelly & McGoey, 2018). However, precisely at this moment, when the social sciences face challenges from multiple fronts - from short-termist expectations of impact, to policy-makers endearement with behavioural science as provider of readily applicable solutions, and the eagerness of some computational scientists to serve as the go-to provider of “social explanations” - it is important that we don't feel pressured to retreat into the narrow methodological frame of “explaination” and to risk inadvertingly reasserting a false hierarchy between explaination and articulation. There is a vital difference between an instrumental social science whose value and legitimacy primarily derive from its ability to service short-term policy needs, and a sociology capable of affirming interactivity between social science and the social world. This difference needs to be urgently clarified, if we are to avoid sleepwalking into a future of shrinking sociological repertoires, and importantly, if we are to get better at engaging, informing and indeed leading the debate that is finally getting underway across the sciences, about what it means to affirm interactivity between knowledge and its objects, not only ethically and politically, but methodologically speaking. To sum up, my real disagreement today is with the “or nothing” element in the idea that social science is explanation or it is nothing. I don't have a problem at all with explanation as a form of social knowledge taking its rightful place among other forms of knowledge in the social sciences. I have a problem with the suggestion that explanation is superior to these other forms, and that other ways of knowing society need to make way for it. My problem is with the hubris of a social science that assumes that the work of articulation, of making phenomena perceptible, can be economised on. It cannot. Explanation depends on articulation: we can only posit and define phenomena and their underlying causes once the struggle to name, to make count - the struggle for the existence of a category - has been fought. The apparatus of explanation that we all rely on - the categories, standards, measures and data formats that together constitute the apparatus of social science - is always at risk of perpetuating outdated, inadequate categories. To the extent that "explanation" assumes that the work of articulation - what matters? how to name this? - can be taken for granted, it risks to become complicit in eroding conditions for articulation. The “or nothing” in the above motion wrongly implies that the renewal of our vocabularies, concepts and methods is of secondary importance. I would therefore like to turn the proposition around. “Social science is reflexive or it is nothing.” Sociology has impressive analytic and methodological resources at its disposal for creating knowledge under conditions of interactivity, and it is this capacity that should be celebrated and requires our endorsement, not just for the sake of advancing the social sciences but all sciences. Social studies of science and technology have shown how interactivity does not just operate on the plane of categorization, but also through indicators, infrastructures and indeed the world, as measures from GPD to the social media “clicks” and the have to the of realities in their affirming such interactivity effects does not making explanation the there are forms of explanation that the changing relations between social reality and the of social reality as their object, as in the work of Norbert Elias In sociological studies of how Elias a of explanation in which change in the explained partly by the dynamics of the I is that our categories, the apparatus that we rely on to render social phenomena and can be understood as a part of these As sociologists have pointed out since at the what and are relevant to the - and - of a social phenomenon is partly at in the of its articulation. is that this to our our categories and the measures that social science on. too, partly depend on and cannot be taken for to and for helpful and to the other in the “Social science is explanation, or it is nothing” for their This debate place online on

Suwan Long, Ying Xie, Zhengyuan Zhou, Brian M. Lucey · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Massimo Terenzi

The rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies come with the promise of decentralizing transactions and disrupting the power of market intermediaries. Despite these promises, scholars argue that the risks associated with cryptocurrencies are still unclear. Some preliminary works investigate the manipulative role played by the circulation of problematic content on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Discord, or Telegram. Nonetheless, the research still lacks a clear and comprehensive picture of how widespread the phenomenon is across the whole ecosystem. Despite its prominence, Facebook is understudied in this context. To fill this gap, this work focuses on the role played by Meta’s main platform, as a venue employed to reach a wide audience prone to potential manipulative practices or scams related to cryptocurrencies. As part of a broader investigation on coordinated disinformation in Africa, we have come across a cluster of Facebook groups sharing content related to cryptocurrencies. The links shared by these networks revealed a very prolific cluster of 152 groups dedicated to Airdrop and Bounty initiatives for new cryptocurrencies. We collected a list of recent posts created by these groups between November 2021 and January 2022 (378,513 URLs). A preliminary analysis of these URLs pointed out an overwhelming presence of links to Telegram (47%) that highlights the central role played by this platform in this specific ecosystem. This paper explores the overlap between the cryptocurrency community and social media, analyzing how crypto-related projects are disseminated as a new type of problematic content on Facebook and Telegram.

Grant Ferguson, Kathryn Haglin, Soren Jordan

Investing in cryptocurrency has become more popular among Americans. Despite this, politicians and social scientists know almost nothing about the politics of cryptocurrency in the American public. By analyzing an original, nationally representative survey of 2500 American respondents, we create the first robust profile of the personalities, demographics, and political attitudes of cryptocurrency owners. We show that Americans who report hardship from inflation are more likely to own cryptocurrency, suggesting that when inflation is high, Americans may be more likely to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange and store of value. Americans who favor lower government spending and are more inclined toward conspiratorial thinking are also more likely to own cryptocurrency. Finally, there is a personality to cryptocurrency owners, with those open to new experiences more likely to own it and the conscientious less likely to own it. Our results have implications for how the American public may use cryptocurrency going forward.

Kevin K.W. Ho, Dickson K.W. Chiu, C. H. Au, Francis Dalisay · 6 authors

This position article summarizes the panelists’ presentations and discussions at the panel “Fake News, Misinformation, and Privacy: How COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Our Society,” held at the 15th International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2022) on October 18, 2022. The panel discussed their views on (1) how to stop the spreading of health misinformation; (2) how information sources affect online health information behavior; (3) how news literacy increases people's desire to seek out information by increasing their skepticism; and (4) how political beliefs, trust, and privacy concerns affect people's decisions during COVID-19. This article also discusses how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can help tackle the fake news and misinformation problem.

Peterson K Ozili

Purpose This paper investigates the global and local interest in Internet information about cryptocurrency and the Nigeria central bank digital currency, which is also known as eNaira. Design/methodology/approach Granger causality test and GMM coefficient matrix methodologies were used. Findings There is sustained increase in global and local interest in Internet information about eNaira in the first six weeks after eNaira adoption. Local interest in Internet information about cryptocurrency in Nigeria exceeded global interest in Internet information about cryptocurrency. The south-east region had the highest interest in cryptocurrency information followed by the south-south, the north-central, the north-east, the north-west and the south-west regions. In contrast, the north-east region had the highest interest in Internet information about eNaira, followed by the north-west, the north–central, the south-west, the south-south and the south-east regions. Nigeria recorded the highest global interest in Internet information about cryptocurrency and eNaira, while Japan and Brazil recorded the lowest interest during the period. The correlation results show a significant and positive correlation between interest in cryptocurrency information and interest in eNaira information. The Granger causality results show that global interest in cryptocurrency information causes both global and local interest in eNaira information. Also, local interest in cryptocurrency information causes global interest in eNaira information. The GMM regression coefficient matrix shows a significant positive relationship between interest in cryptocurrency information and eNaira information. Originality/value There are few studies on CBDC in country-specific contexts. This study adds to the literature by examining the Nigerian context.

Rashad Ahmed, Iñaki Aldasoro, Chanelle Duley

No abstract is available for this record.

Nizan Geslevich Packin, Sean Stein Smith

No abstract is available for this record.

Joshua T. White, Sean Wilkoff, Serhat Yildiz

No abstract is available for this record.

Danqi Hu, Sarit Markovich, Valerie Zhang

Using data from one of the first and most popular decentralized lending protocols, MakerDao, we study whether computer-language-based information lends itself for the efficient use of information in a market that features real-time transparency. We first find that there is persistent cross-sectional difference in performance, where persistence increases with investors sophistication. We then study how different types of processing costs affect the extent to which investors use past loan performance to mimic experts in real time (i.e., efficient mimicking). Our results show that awareness costs, proxied by loan activity level, hinder efficient mimicking. More importantly, acquisition and integration costs associated with translating code-based information into useful trading signals impedes investors’ ability to take advantage of information embedded in smart contracts. Our paper has important implications for regulators and practitioners aiming at more efficient use of information in smart contracts and on blockchain.

Adnan Qayyum, Junaid Qadir, Muhammad Umar Janjua, Falak Sher

In recent years, `fake news' has become a global issue that raises unprecedented challenges for human society and democracy. This problem has arisen due to the emergence of various concomitant phenomena such as (1) the digitization of human life and the ease of disseminating news through social networking applications (such as Facebook and WhatsApp); (2) the availability of `big data' that allows customization of news feeds and the creation of polarized so-called `filter-bubbles'; and (3) the rapid progress made by generative machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms in creating realistic-looking yet fake digital content (such as text, images, and videos). There is a crucial need to combat the rampant rise of fake news and disinformation. In this paper, we propose a high-level overview of a blockchain-based framework for fake news prevention and highlight the various design issues and consideration of such a blockchain-based framework for tackling fake news.

Sheila Ogochukwu Nnabuife, Yosra Jarrar

Given the economic hardship in Nigeria in the past few years, Nigerians resorted to finding alternative ways as a survival strategy. Bit-coin and a good number of other crypto currencies formed the long sought economic alternative to such extent that it is gradually getting public acceptance as a means of transaction. Subsequent upon the collapse of MMM, the Nigerian government dismissed the use of crypto as legal means of exchange in Nigeria. This brought about reaction from bit-coin participants, experts and government officials. This study therefore is an examination of online media coverage aimed at ascertaining the slant of coverage, the dominant media source and type and how detailed the reports issued in the media concerning Bit-coin are. The researcher used the qualitative and quantitative content analysis research method to examine the manifest contents of the selected online media while framing and social responsibility theory formed the benchmark for the study. The study spanned for three months covering December 2017 through February 2018. Findings revealed that Nigerian online media gave negative slant to their coverage of Bit-coin crypto currency. It was also found that while government source dominates news source, straight news reports dominated the types of media used in the coverage of Bit-coin crypto-currency. The researcher concluded that the media had played their social responsibility role to the public by providing detailed reports on bit-coin and recommended that the mainstream media should also join hands in delivering detailed messages on salient issues.

Ross C. Phillips, Denise Gorse

Financial price bubbles have previously been linked with the epidemic-like spread of an investment idea; such bubbles are commonly seen in cryptocurrency prices. This paper aims to predict such bubbles for a number of cryptocurrencies using a hidden Markov model previously utilised to detect influenza epidemic outbreaks, based in this case on the behaviour of novel online social media indicators. To validate the methodology further, a trading strategy is built and tested on historical data. The resulting trading strategy outperforms a buy and hold strategy. The work demonstrates both the broader utility of epidemic-detecting hidden Markov models in the identification of bubble-like behaviour in time series, and that social media can provide valuable predictive information pertaining to cryptocurrency price movements.

Ladislav Krištoufek

Digital currencies have emerged as a new fascinating phenomenon in the financial markets. Recent events on the most popular of the digital currencies--BitCoin--have risen crucial questions about behavior of its exchange rates and they offer a field to study dynamics of the market which consists practically only of speculative traders with no fundamentalists as there is no fundamental value to the currency. In the paper, we connect two phenomena of the latest years--digital currencies, namely BitCoin, and search queries on Google Trends and Wikipedia--and study their relationship. We show that not only are the search queries and the prices connected but there also exists a pronounced asymmetry between the effect of an increased interest in the currency while being above or below its trend value.