Not logged in.
Quick Search - Contribution
Contribution Details
| Type | Bachelor's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Who are Influencers of Bitcoin? Price Reactions to Social Network Sentiment |
| Organization Unit | |
| Authors |
|
| Supervisors |
|
| Language |
|
| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Number of Pages | 49 |
| Date | 2020 |
| Abstract Text | October 2008 was one of the worst months since the beginning of the world stock market. A CNN journalist, Smith (2008), called that month "Red October". On October 31, a document titled: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" appeared on the Internet. Eight pages briefly described an entirely new type of money, Bitcoin. The origin of this document was covered with a veil of mystery. Some think that its creator(s) deliberately waited for the existing financial system to fall into a deep crisis, so people would be more open to the alternative offered. First, Bitcoins were created in January 2009, but in the first 16 months, nothing was actually paid in Bitcoins. For the first time on May 22, 2010, tangible goods, two pizzas, were paid in Bitcoins. From 2008 to the present, Bitcoin’s putative and mysterious founder(s) Satoshi Nakamoto, backed by influential investors, has succeeded to persuade many people to trust and trade with the unsecured type of money (Corradi & Höfner, 2018). Market capitalisation of Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2017 was $17.56 billion; one year later at the end of the first quarter of 2018, it amounted to $117.56 billion (Statista, 2018). That is the reason why Bitcoin catches attention of many newspapers, magazines and social media. As the digital currency represents not only technical but also a social innovation, many famous experts and researchers have discussed and expressed their opinions on it (Bartos, 2015), (Bernard, 2017), (Karalevicius, 2018), (Nakamoto, 2009). Central banks, afraid to be replaced, and investors, seeking great potential returns, had a significant interest in comprehending the factors which determined Bitcoin’s value. Corradi and Höfner (2018) show that Bitcoin’s price changes according to internal news, i.e. announcements that inform about Bitcoin’s usage and community rather than to general economic news. Previous research findings point out that news on social media and online discussions have a greater impact on Bitcoin than traditional media (Mai et al., 2018). Authors analyse different effects of active and inactive social network users, dividing them by the quantity of content they contribute. Testing their ‘silent majority hypothesis’, they argue that information generated from silent, more common types of users, had a greater influence on Bitcoin price than news and facts coming from active users. However, authors recognise that further investigation of social network cohorts may lead to new findings and different results. |
| Export |
BibTeX
|