Price Fluctuations and the Use of Bitcoin: An Empirical Inquiry
研究了比特币的支付和投资特性，发现其回报受流行度、新闻报道情绪和交易量驱动，并基于全球商户调查分析了影响比特币支付比例的因素。
Over recent years, interest has been growing in Bitcoin, an innovation that has the potential to play an important role in e-commerce and beyond. The aim of our paper is to provide a comprehensive empirical study of the payment and investment features of Bitcoin, and their implications for the conduct of e-commerce. Since network externality theory suggests that the value of a network and its take-up are interlinked, we investigate both adoption and price formation. We discover that its returns are driven primarily by Bitcoin’s popularity, the sentiment expressed in newspaper reports on cryptocurrency, and total number of transactions. The paper also reports on the first global survey of merchants who have adopted this technology, and we model the share of sales paid for with this alternative currency, using both ordinary and Tobit regressions. Our analysis examines how country-, customer-, and company-specific characteristics interact with the proportion of sales attributed to Bitcoin. We find that company features, use of other payment methods, customers’ knowledge about Bitcoin, and the size of both the official and unofficial economy are significant determinants. The results will be of interest to traders who seek to understand factors driving prices and will help to inform vendors as to the most favorable circumstances for adopting the currency for online transactions.