Benjamin Johnson, Daniel Stjepanović, Janni Leung, Tianze Sun · 5 authors
Background: The volatility and 24/7 nature of the cryptocurrency market allows traders to engage in highly speculative trading patterns that closely resemble gambling. Considering its potential for addiction and economic loss, it is important to investigate the impact that cryptocurrency trading has on mental health. Therefore, we analyzed Reddit discussions regarding mental health, gambling, and addiction from members of the discussion board, r/cryptocurrency, during a recent downturn in the market.Method: We collected 1315 threads submitted to the subreddit r/cryptocurrency from January 3rd to February 4th 2022. A thematic analysis was employed, which included threads that discussed psychological wellbeing, mental health or gambling.Results: We thematically analyzed the content threads that discussed psychological wellbeing, mental health or gambling. Our analysis identified three main themes present in user discussion. Theme 1 (emotional state and mental health) captured users’ discussion on their wellbeing, mental health and emotional responses to the market downturn. Theme 2 (strategies for coping) examined coping strategies recommended by users to combat distress or trading urges. Theme 3 (likeness to gambling) captured a discussion on the relationship between cryptocurrency and gambling based on its fixating properties and risk profile.Conclusions: Reddit is a valuable resource for examining the experiences and attitudes of the cryptocurrency community. Discussion from users provided insight into the mental distress market downturns cause and strategies to help combat these. Our findings offer qualitative insights into the problems experienced by individuals who cryptocurrency trade and encourage further investigation into its relationship with mental health and addiction.
This paper provides an overview of how the focus of youth gambling research has evolved since the foundational work of the 1990s. Over the last two decades, research in youth gambling has advanced from having a principal focus on under-aged access to adult commercial activities to understanding the impact of gambling-like content in social media and gaming. The process of digital convergence and ‘gamblification’ has blurred the boundaries between activities, and the rise of gambling and gaming ecosystems. Research suggests that early exposure to gambling-like content (e.g. loot boxes or social casino games) may lead to a transition to commercial gambling. Here we provide an overview of current evidence, important technological developments and conceptual analyses; and, current directions in digital technology and their potential impact. The potential now exists for the merging of multiple classes of activity: gaming, gambling and speculative trading as a result of blockchain technology. The paper underscores the importance of the need for future studies to capture the breadth of gambling and gambling-like activities available to young people. It also indicates that pathways into gambling may arise within other population groups (e.g. gamers, digital asset investors) rather than from direct exposure to commercial gambling products.
Gamification is an effective strategy for motivating and engaging users, which is grounded in business, marketing, and management by designing games in nongame contexts. Gamifying education, which consists of the design and study of educational games, is an emerging trend. However, the existing classroom games for understanding macroeconomics have weak connections to the microfoundations of individual decision-making. We design an educational game on cryptocurrency investment for understanding macroeconomic concepts in microeconomic decisions. We contribute to the literature by designing game-based learning that engages students in understanding macroeconomics in incentivized individual investment decisions. Our game can be widely implemented in online, in-person, and hybrid classrooms. We also reflect on strategies for improving the user experience for future educational game implementations.
Anton Wahrstätter, Jorão Gomes, Sajjad Khan, Davor Svetinović
The potential of Bitcoin for money laundering and terrorist financing represents a significant challenge in law enforcement. In recent years, the use of privacy-improving CoinJoin transactions has grown significantly and helped criminal actors obfuscate Bitcoin money flows. In this study, we use unsupervised machine learning to analyze the complete Bitcoin user graph in order to identify suspicious actors potentially involved in illegal activities. In contrast to the existing studies, we introduce a novel set of features that we use to identify potential criminal activity more accurately. Furthermore, we apply our clustering algorithm to a CoinJoin-adjusted variant of the Bitcoin user graph, which enables us to analyze the network at a more detailed, user-centric level while still offering opportunities to address advanced privacy-enhancing techniques at a later stage. By comparing the results with our ground truth data set, we find that our improved clustering method is able to capture significantly more illicit activity within the most suspicious clusters. Finally, we find that users associated with illegal activities commonly have significant short paths to CoinJoin wallets and show tendencies toward outlier behavior. Our results have potential contributions to anti-money laundering efforts and combating the financing of terrorism and other illegal activities.
The purpose of gamification in cryptocurrencies is to improve user engagement through game-thinking (Kabita, 2020; Rodrigues et al., 2019). Yet, it is unclear whether participants are motivated by the desire to have fun or to generate money. This study intends to explore the elements that encourage people to participate in cryptocurrency gamification by analysing perceived enjoyment, perceived profitability, and demographic variables. Data was obtained from Thai nationals residing in Thailand who have invested in digital assets or plan to in the future. Using multivariate logistic regression, statistically significant factors were identified. The data indicate that Thai investors’ interest in cryptocurrency gamification increases with age and student status. Also, people are attracted to the gamification of cryptocurrencies since they may be both interesting and lucrative. The study argues that it is essential to assess the risks associated with the gamification of cryptocurrencies. This will ensure that individuals who wish to earn money do not lose it. In addition, the likelihood of financial exploitation through cryptocurrency gaming must be evaluated. This is required because the risk of individuals being victimised through scams increases as the number of persons who play these games grows.
Bambang Leo Handoko, Agustinus Winoto, Faris Kasenda, Citra Amanda · 5 authors
Investing in cryptocurrencies is one of the instruments that is increasingly in demand by individual investors today. Investors are starting to aim for other advantages of investing in cryptocurrencies besides capital gains, which is the benefits of getting airdrops. Through this research, we want to examine what factors influence investors' intention to invest through the cryptocurrency airdrops program. We take these factors from the behavioral finance approach. We use heuristic behavior, prospect theory and role of personality variables. Our research is a causal quantitative research. We collected primary data from a questionnaire distributed to experienced individual investors participating in one of the cryptocurrency airdrops programs. We use hypothesis testing with ordinary least square analysis. The research result is that heuristic behavior, prospect theory, and role of personality each has significant influence on investor decision making in cryptocurrency airdrops.
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With the popularity of cryptocurrencies and the remarkable development of blockchain technology, decentralized applications emerged as a revolutionary force for the Internet. Meanwhile, decentralized applications have also attracted intense attention from the online gambling community, with more and more decentralized gambling platforms created through the help of smart contracts. Compared with conventional gambling platforms, decentralized gambling have transparent rules and a low participation threshold, attracting a substantial number of gamblers. In order to discover gambling behaviors and identify the contracts and addresses involved in gambling, we propose a tool termed ETHGamDet. The tool is able to automatically detect the smart contracts and addresses involved in gambling by scrutinizing the smart contract code and address transaction records. Interestingly, we present a novel LightGBM model with memory components, which possesses the ability to learn from its own misclassifications. As a side contribution, we construct and release a large-scale gambling dataset at https://github.com/AwesomeHuang/Bitcoin-Gambling-Dataset to facilitate future research in this field. Empirically, ETHGamDet achieves a F1-score of 0.72 and 0.89 in address classification and contract classification respectively, and offers novel and interesting insights.
Atte Oksanen, Heli Hagfors, Ilkka Vuorinen, Iina Savolainen
OBJECTIVES: Cryptocurrency trading has gained popularity over the last few years. Trading is facilitated by online platforms that enable 24/7 trading. Cryptocurrency trading is potentially attractive to gamblers, and it may increase their gambling problems. Furthermore, cryptocurrency trading might be a particularly harmful activity for those gambling offshore. We investigated whether cryptocurrency trading predicts excessive gambling over time. We also analyzed how cryptocurrency trading combined with offshore gambling is associated with excessive gambling. STUDY DESIGN: This was a population-based longitudinal survey study. METHODS: We surveyed a sample of Finnish people aged 18-75 years (N = 1022, 51.27% male) at three time points in 6-month intervals: April 2021 (T1), October to November 2021 (T2), and April to May 2022 (T3). Of the original T1 respondents, 66.80% took part in T2 and T3. Outcome measure was excessive gambling using the Problem Gambling Severity Index, and the predictor was cryptocurrency trading. We adjusted models for onshore and offshore gambling online, excessive gaming (Internet Gaming Disorder Test), excessive internet use (Compulsive Internet Use Scale), excessive alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test), and sociodemographic background factors. We used multilevel regression models to investigate within-person and between-person effects. RESULTS: Cryptocurrency trading has increased in popularity over time. Within-person changes in cryptocurrency trading predicted increased excessive gambling. Excessive gambling was also generally more common among cryptocurrency traders. The full model that was adjusted for the number of confounding factors showed that cryptocurrency trading had a within-person effect on excessive gambling. Of the confounding factors, offshore online gambling, excessive gaming, and excessive internet use had within-person effects on excessive gambling. Offshore and onshore online gamblers and excessive gamers showed more excessive gambling than others. Those participants who were both cryptocurrency traders and offshore gamblers showed significantly higher rate of excessive gambling than others. CONCLUSIONS: Cryptocurrency trading is a risky activity and associated with a higher rate of excessive gambling over time. Such activity is especially risky among offshore online gamblers, who could view cryptocurrency trading as another form of gambling or as a way to make money for gambling. Policymakers and counselors should be aware of the risks of cryptocurrency trading.
Feijie Wu, Ho Yin Yuen, Henry C. B. Chan, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors
Applying peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture to online video games has already attracted both academic and industrial interests, since it removes the need for expensive server maintenance. However, there are two major issues preventing the use of a P2P architecture, namely how to provide an effective distributed data storage solution, and how to tackle potential cheating behaviors. Inspired by emerging blockchain techniques, we propose a novel consensus model called Proof-of-Play (PoP) to provide a decentralized data storage system that incorporates an anti-cheating mechanism for P2P games, by rewarding players that interact with the game as intended, along with consideration of security measures to address the Nothing-at-stake Problem and the Long-range Attack. To validate our design, we utilize a game-theory model to show that under certain assumptions, the integrity of the PoP system would not be undermined due to the best interests of any user. Then, as a proof-of-concept, we developed a P2P game ( Infinity Battle ) to demonstrate how a game can be integrated with PoP in practice. Finally, experiments were conducted to study PoP in comparison with Proof-of-Work (PoW) to show its advantages in various aspects.
The study of blockchain (BC) technologies has been applied to a wide breadth of research fields in recent years, chasing the realization of its full potential. Among them, video games have become a very eager adopter of blockchain in many of its different facets: cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and smart contracts. This paper presents the results of a scoping review in order to answer the research question "What is the current state of academic research in blockchain applied to video games?". After a thorough search in a diverse set of scientific databases, a total of 39 fitting publications were methodically retrieved, studied and categorized. The results draw a clearer picture of the current state-of-the art, as well as the identification of relevant trends and opportunities in this topic.
Public health harms from gambling are now well recognised. Public Health England estimates societal gambling-related harm in England exceeds £1·27 billion. Australian research estimates that the years lost to disability from gambling exceeds that of diabetes.1 Policy makers have begun to take action; gambling advertising and sponsorship is banned in Italy, and English football clubs and the UK government are currently considering sponsorship bans for the Premier League.2
Reza Putra Pradana, Mochamad Hariadi, Reza Fuad Rachmadi, Yunifa Miftachul Arif
The market value of the gaming industry in 2021 is said to be more than 198.40 billion USD. Market value is also supported by the number of gamers, with 4.75 billion in January 2022. In today’s In-App Purchase (IAP) income method has become a big trend in today’s modern era models of free-to-play games, where gamers can choose or buy many items during the game to speed up the progress of the game or enjoy the full content of the game. However, sometimes players are overwhelmed with the number of items on offer, making it difficult for players to choose because the game content is too diverse. In addition, players are also worried about the security of their digital assets because, in 2021, there will be 7.5 million digital assets lost due to hacking. We propose a recommendation system to make it easier for players to choose items that suit their playstyle to solve this problem. We use the multi-criteria recommender system (MCRS) method because this method can improve the accuracy of recommendations compared to conventional recommendations that only use one criterion. In this study, we used eight criteria to calculate the recommendations. The results of our recommendation test show the accuracy value = 0.71, precision = 0.76, recall = 0.71 and F1 score = 0.66. To address security issues, we propose the implementation of a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) for each item. NFT can increase security because it uses a decentralized blockchain architecture in which every transaction is encrypted. The system guarantees that the assets will remain online so that users do not risk losing ownership of their assets when the developer changes game data, or the game server closes.
Benjamin Johnson, Daniel Stjepanović, Janni Leung, Tianze Sun · 5 authors
Abstract Purpose Considering the volatility of the cryptocurrency market, it is important to investigate the impact that market participation has on mental health. Therefore, we analyzed Reddit discussions regarding mental health, gambling, and addiction from members of the cryptocurrency discussion board, r/cryptocurrency, during a recent downturn in the cryptocurrency market. Methods We collected 1315 threads submitted to the subreddit r/cryptocurrency between January 3rd to February 4th. A thematic analysis was employed, which included threads that discussed psychological wellbeing, mental health or gambling. Results We thematically analyzed the content of 130 threads, which contained 7635 comments. Our analysis identified three main themes present in user discussion. Theme 1 (emotional state and mental health) captured users' discussion on their wellbeing, mental health and emotional responses to the market downturn. Theme 2 (strategies for coping) examined coping strategies recommended by users to combat distress to the market conditions or trading urges. Theme 3 (likeness to gambling) captured discussion on the relationship between cryptocurrency and gambling based on its fixating properties and risk profile. Conclusions Reddit is a valuable resource for examining the experiences and attitudes of the cryptocurrency community. Accounts of Reddit users' experiences provided insight into the mental distress market downturns can cause and strategies to combat problems due to trading. Our findings offer qualitative insights into the problems experienced by individuals who cryptocurrency trade and encourage further investigation into its relationship with mental health.
We are often faced with the non-trivial task of designing incentive mechanisms in the era of Web3. As history has shown, many Web3 services failed mostly due to the lack of a rigorous incentive mechanism design based on token economics. However, traditional mechanism design, where there is an assumption that the users of services strategically make decisions so that their expected profits are maximized, often does not capture their real behavior well as it ignores humans' psychological bias in making decisions under uncertainty. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism design for crypto-enabled services using behavioral economics. Specifically, we take an example of a crypto lottery game in this work and incorporate a seminal work of cumulative prospect theory into its lottery game mechanism (or rule) design. We designed four mechanisms and compared them in terms of utility, a metric of how appealing a mechanism is to participants, and a game operator's expected profit. Our approach is generic and will be applicable to a wide range of crypto-based services where a decision has to be made under uncertainty.
Maira Andrade, Steve Sharman, Leon Y. Xiao, Philip Newall
OBJECTIVE: Online gambling has increased the accessibility and range of gambling products available to people all over the world. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom. Cryptocurrency-based gambling is a new, largely unregulated, way to gamble online, which uses mostly anonymous blockchain-based technologies, such as Bitcoin. The present research investigated consumer protection features of 40 frequently visited and U.K.-accessible cryptocurrency-based online gambling operators. METHOD: A content analysis was performed by visiting all 40 cryptocurrency-based online operators and recording their safer gambling and consumer protection practices. Coded features included aspects of the sign-up process, features of any safer gambling pages, customer support practices, and Identity verification. RESULTS: Results revealed significant failings in the account registration process; none of the operators verified the identity of new users, and 35% required only an email or no personal information for sign-up. Overall, 37.5% of operators offered no safer gambling tools and a further 20% offered only one. Additionally, 64.7% of operators continued to email promotional material after being informed of a user's impaired control when gambling. Less than half of the analyzed operators held a valid license (47.5%), and none of the operators with an available deposit page required identity verification before enabling deposits. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the potential risks for young and vulnerable individuals, especially when a lack of identity verification is paired with the inherent anonymity of cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for greater policy and research attention toward cryptocurrency-based online gambling. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
We present a decentralized online gaming platform implemented as a Decentralized Application (DApp) on the Ethereum blockchain. The gaming platform enables secure gaming, where the account balances and the stakes of the players are secured by a smart contract. Moreover, the fair enforcement of the game rules and the deposit of the winnings of the players and the gaming platform into their accounts are guaranteed by the smart contract. The gaming platform proposes lending functionalities that allow players to securely borrow tokens from the gaming platform in order to participate in the games.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) exist today as a component of a broader, ever-evolving financial environment in which questions of value, ownership, and intention are characterized by their ambiguity. This article considers Dapper Labs “NBA Top Shot,” a blockchain-backed website inviting NBA fans to join in “a new era in fandom” wherein they may acquire NFTs of NBA highlights by opening “packs,” which are functionally similar to trading cards. NFTs reflect the pressures of market forces, as well as increased cultural and economic emphasis on marketization, financialization, commodification, and the ubiquity of gambling-like designs and interactions. Furthermore, this study explores tensions present in differing intentions for the NBA Top Shot platform and Discord server, the diffuse nature of user conversations (a nature that disregards topical boundaries), and audience attention toward marketization and investment interests. The commodification of the NBA fan experience illustrates a shared social pressure to more readily think of one’s life, interactions, and consumptive behaviors through the lens of the investor, fostering financial attitudes that normalize instability and encourage risk-taking beyond the scope of a platform where purchase-dependent interactions serve as a source of joy and social experience in a venue representing a perceived electronic gold rush.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) markets are one of the fastest growing digital markets today, with the sales during the third quarter of 2021 exceeding $10 billions! Nevertheless, these emerging markets - similar to traditional emerging marketplaces - can be seen as a great opportunity for illegal activities (e.g., money laundering, sale of illegal goods etc.). In this study we focus on a specific marketplace, namely NBA TopShot, that facilitates the purchase and (peer-to-peer) trading of sports collectibles. Our objective is to build a framework that is able to label peer-to-peer transactions on the platform as anomalous or not. To achieve our objective we begin by building a model for the profit to be made by selling a specific collectible on the platform. We then use RFCDE - a random forest model for the conditional density of the dependent variable - to model the errors from the profit models. This step allows us to estimate the probability of a transaction being anomalous. We finally label as anomalous any transaction whose aforementioned probability is less than 1%. Given the absence of ground truth for evaluating the model in terms of its classification of transactions, we analyze the trade networks formed from these anomalous transactions and compare it with the full trade network of the platform. Our results indicate that these two networks are statistically different when it comes to network metrics such as, edge density, closure, node centrality and node degree distribution. This network analysis provides additional evidence that these transactions do not follow the same patterns that the rest of the trades on the platform follow. However, we would like to emphasize here that this does not mean that these transactions are also illegal. These transactions will need to be further audited from the appropriate entities to verify whether or not they are illicit.
Ryan Francisco, Nelson Rodelas, John Edison Ubaldo
Purpose – This study aims to shed light on the rise of play-to-earn games in the Philippines alongside cryptocurrency. The lack of research and public understanding of its benefits and drawbacks prompted the researchers to investigate its market. As such, the study tried to look into the risks and benefits of crypto gaming if it would be regulated by the government, and how market volatility influences the churn rate of crypto games. Method – The research used a descriptive study to determine the perception of people who are engaged in playing “Axie Infinity”. The research also used non-probability sampling using the snowball method. The only tool used to collect data was Google Forms. Furthermore, the study used Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) to analyze the descriptive data. Result – The results showed that most players spend their time playing Axie Infinity for about 1 to 4 hours a day. Predominantly, the return of investments for playing the game will take about 1 to 3 months. It also showed that these players agreed that there is a possible financial instability in a volatile market. With this, they have a high trust issue in terms of price manipulation, privacy and security, and its design and usability. Conclusion – Understanding the cryptocurrency market requires comprehending the perspective of the people who are engaged in a play-to-earn game, and their concerns are critical for any government actions aimed at regulating self-employed income earners playing (Non-fungible Tokens) NFT games in the Philippines. Recommendations – It is suggested that further research must be conducted to understand how self-employed Filipino income earners comprehend NFT gaming and cryptocurrency, impacting their level of interest and participation. Research Implications – Taxing NFT games without sound regulatory frameworks may result in the disarray of this alternative income source. Therefore, the government must tread carefully to avoid a market collapse or other unfavorable outcomes.
Rui Gonçalves, Leandro Pereira, Renato Lopes Da Costa, Ãlvaro Dias · 5 authors
Over the past few years, cryptocurrencies have been increasingly spoken and have become a global phenomenon known. Their high volatility and lack of regulation makes these investments very risky, and even though these coins are often associated with criminal activities, an increase on the number of investors is visible every day. Most of the published studies explain the technology behind cryptocurrencies, however, there was no published study that aims to understand what kind of profile these investors have and what are their motivations or expectations. Based on a questionnaires and interviews presented to the investors, this study concluded that there are two separate investor profiles and also understood what are their motivations and expectations for the future. It was also possible to see what vision regulators, private equities and corporate banking have for this new type of currency and if they consider them as a valid mean of payment.