I princip hela IT-världen ser på och häpnar medan Blockchain-tekniken växer. Många spekulerar om fördelar och nackdelar med tekniken. Men hur ser egentligen samhället på detta nya sättet att lagra data på? Det finns väldigt lite forskning på hur Blockchain uppfattas i Sverige, hur tekniken uppfattas och vad folk vet om tekniken. Det har inte heller hittats någon undersökning som tar upp graden av tillit privatpersoner har till Blockchain i Sverige och vad för faktorer det är som påverkar privatpersoners tillit. För att tekniken ska kunna accepteras på en större skala behöver man veta vad privatpersoner och konsumenter tycker om tekniken, annars finns det risk att tekniken inte omfamnas i framtiden. Syftet med denna undersökningen är att, på ett explorativt sätt, ta reda på till vilken grad privatpersoner i Sverige har tillit för Blockchain som teknik. Undersökningen skall också, i ett explorativt syfte, identifiera faktorer till varför den svenska befolkningen litar mer eller mindre på Blockchain. Studien använder sig av både kvalitativa och kvantitativa datainsamlingstekniker. Det utfördes en kvalitativ studie i form av personliga intervjuer för att ta reda på vad privatpersoner vet om Blockchain, och vad folk anser är viktiga faktorer som påverkar deras tillit för tekniken. Den kvalitativa undersökningen utfördes för att säkra att den sedan kvantitativa undersökningen fick in så pålitlig data som möjligt. Den kvantitativa undersökningen var en enkätstudie. I enkäten var det frågor som behandlade tillit, kunskap om ämnet, generell inställning till ny teknik och bakgrundsfrågor om respondenten. I analysen har det framgått att 10,47% privatpersoner från undersökningen i Västra Götalands län litar mindre på Blockchain, 19,19% litar inte alls på tekniken, 63,95% litar neutralt på den, 4,1% litar ganska mycket på den och 2,33% litar fullt ut på den. Utifrån detta kan slutsatsen dras att tillitsgraden är relativt låg. Resultatet visade också att det fanns ett antal återkommande faktorer som påverkade privatpersoners tillit för Blockchain. Dessa faktorer var manipulering, decentralisering och att Blockchain anses vara relaterat till svarta marknaden. Vidare kan man utifrån denna undersökning utläsa både en låg kunskapsnivå samt en hög neutral attityd till tekniken. Detta skulle kunna anses som någonting positivt för teknikens framtid då få förutfattade meningar finns. Mer information om Blockchain skulle därmed kunna vara en möjlighet för ökad tillit. För vidare forskning föreslogs det att det bör forskas mer om detta utanför Västra Götalands län och att man bör undersöka om privatpersoner kan tänka sig använda tekniken även om de inte litar på tekniken fullt ut. / Developments in Blockchain technology has grown so rapidly that it has, in a short time, become a core business in the IT industry. These developments have come with positive and negative impacts and their overall perception by society has remained uncertain. Limited work has focused on understanding the societal perception of Blockchain, particularly the extent to which society trust such technology. Moreover, it is not only important to understand the level of trust for a technology such as Blockchain that is built on transparency, but even the factors that influence such trust. In order for the technology to be accepted on a larger scale, one needs to know what individuals and consumers think about the technology, otherwise there is a risk that that the potential of the technology may not be fully utilized. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to explore the extent to which individuals in Sweden trust Blockchain as a technology. The overall goals and approach can be applied anywhere else in the world. The report identifies factors as to why the Swedish population trusts more or less in Blockchain. The study uses both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques. A qualitative study was conducted in the form of personal interviews to find out what individuals know about Blockchain, and what people consider to be important factors that affect their trust in Blockchain. The qualitative survey was conducted to build a foundation for the quantitative study. The quantitative survey was conducted with the help of questionnaires. The questionnaire addressed trust, knowledge of the technology, as well as respondent's general attitude toward new technology. The respondents were restricted to a sample of individuals living in Sweden between age range 18 to 65+. Based on the survey sample of about 172 participants, the analysis shows that 10.47% of individuals in the Västra Götaland county are less familiar with Blockchain, 19.19% do not count on the technology at all, 63.95% are neutral, 4.1% trust it fairly and 2.33% fully trust it. From this, the conclusion can be drawn that the trust is relatively low. The result also showed that there were a number of recurring factors that affected individuals' confidence in Blockchain. These factors were data integrity, decentralization and the fact that Blockchain is considered to be related to the black market. Furthermore, on the basis of this survey, it is possible to interpret both a low level of knowledge and a high neutral attitude towards the technology. This could be considered as something positive for the future of technology as few pre-defined opinions exist. More information about Blockchain could thus be an opportunity for increased trust. For further research, it was suggested that more research should be done involving a much larger sample in order to investigate if individuals would be willing to accept the technology even if they do not fully trust the technology.

Cryptocurrencies are a cryptography based technology, that has increased massively in popularity in recent years. These currencies are traded on markets that specialize in cryptocurrency trade. There, you can trade one cryptocurrency for another, or buy one with real world money. These markets are quite volatile, meaning that the price of most cryptocurrencies swing up and down a lot. The largest cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, but there is also more than 1500 smaller ones, that goes by the name alternative coins, or altcoins. This thesis will try to find out if it is possible to make accurate predictions about the future price of the altcoin Ethereum, and also see if Bitcoin may have some influence over the price of the selected altcoin. The predictions were made with the use of an artificial neural network, an LSTM network, that was trained on labeled data from 2017. The predictions were then made in intervals of one hour ahead, six hours ahead, and one day ahead through early 2018. The predictions showed that it is possible to make somewhat accurate predictions about the future. The predictions that were made one hour ahead were more accurate than both the six hours ahead predictions and the full day ahead predictions. By comparing the loss rates of the neural networks that were only trained on Ethereum, with the loss rates of the networks that trained on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, is was made clear that training on both cryptocurrencies did not improve the prediction accuracies.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of bitcoin in an investment portfolio. The paper examines the nature of bitcoin and additionally how bitcoin compares to gold when included in an investment portfolio. This report uses the historical value of bitcoin and investigates with a Mean-Variance model how the risk-adjusted return of an optimized portfolio is affected when bitcoin is a constituent. By comparing Sharpe Ratios from the optimized portfolios, a conclusion can be drawn as to whether bitcoin affects the maximum Sharpe ratio or the global minimum variance point. Our study suggests that including bitcoin in an investment portfolio increases the risk-adjusted return of the portfolio. In addition, portfolios optimized with bitcoin outperform the market. Further, we conclude that bitcoin has a relatively high correlation as compared to gold with the assets in the study. Hence, bitcoin is not the new gold.

Money can be understood as a disembedding mechanism, detaching social relations from a spatiotemporal context. However, different infrastructural instantiations of money make visible–and invisible–different qualities of money. Through a two-month ethnographic study of El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as a complimentary legal tender, I show how Bitcoin in El Salvador functions as a technology of the imagination that brings future-making and deterritorialization into the forefront of money infrastructure(s).  The thesis is divided into three main parts. First, I briefly introduce how people leverage Bitcoin as a tool for shaping subjective attitudes towards time, and consequently–to inspire hope.  Then, I show how foreigners travelling to El Salvador to use Bitcoin are not doing this out of economic considerations. Rather, this transnational group of Bitcoiners can be characterised as a recursive public that utilises Bitcoin to escape the formation of the nation-state and form a deterritorialized community around shared speculative visions of the future. Bitcoin also allows them to make general infrastructural features of money visible and to contest these. The prime example being money’s disciplinary effects on subjective attitudes towards time. In the last part, I show how deterritorialization and speculative futures also come to the forefront of Salvadoran imaginaries of Bitcoin. We can understand attitudes of fear and attitudes of hope as responses to this imaginary. The thesis concludes by arguing that Bitcoin’s materiality affords imaginaries of disembedded social landscapes, thus rendering visible preexisting infrastructural features of money. However, in the specific context of El Salvador Bitcoin also works as a tool for re-embedding, but only for the Bitcoiners.

[pt] A principal contribuição deste trabalho é: Discutir os desafios e oportunidades no surgimento das Finanças Descentralizadas. Este trabalho fornece uma visão abrangente dos princípios fundamentais que sustentam as tecnologias Blockchain, como arquiteturas de sistema e algoritmos de consenso distribuído. Em seguida, nos concentramos em possíveis soluções de Blockchain para o setor financeiro, discutindo seus desafios e oportunidades. / [en] The main contribution of this work is: Discuss the challenges and opportunities in the emergence of Decentralized Finance. This work provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamental principles that underpin Blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on possible Blockchain solutions for the financial sector by discussing their challenges and opportunities.

Up until now, Bitcoin as a marketing tool to leverage the brand image of an e-retailer has only been researched scarcely. This paper contributes to filling this gap by looking at Bitcoin’s suitability as primarily a cognition-based trust-building tool in the context of online sex shops. Online sex shops in which affective-based trust is taken as a use-case to exemplarily assess whether far associations customers have with Bitcoin can be transferred unto their brand image, assessing its effectiveness. Moreover, as Bitcoin is a payment method, this study feels the pulse in how far trust is established with the general public to assess chances of success when introducing it as an option to existing alternatives. Trust is considered important in the transaction and decision-making processes of a customer as much as it is in building and fostering brand image. Two expert interviews and one survey make up the data source for this research to gain a holistic view from the customer’s, the retailer’s and the industry expert’s perspective. Findings from the different sources were first in-case analyzed before cross-comparing them. The study highlighted the fact that Bitcoin as a marketing tool is highly case-sensitive, cognition-based, and risky in both - financial and marketing terms. It is best used as part of a long-term strategy and in cases in which the brand image of a brand is as similar to that of Bitcoin as possible. Additionally, Bitcoin disposes of many of the same qualities as other payment methods do and although trust in it is still limited, it is competitive in terms of factors like transaction speed and cost. There is no uniform bundle of associations and a positive or negative evaluation thereof to be connected to it, however, factors like gender, financial education, and trust in one’s own abilities are all found to influence trust and usage intention. The study finds potential for both – Bitcoin as a marketing tool and payment method.

This paper uses a back-propagating neural network (BPN) to predict the price movements of major crypto currencies, leveraging technical factors as well as measurements of collective sentiment derived from the micro-blogging network Twitter. Our dataset consists of daily, hourly and minutely price levels for Bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin along with 8 popular technical indicators, as well as all tweets with the currencies' cash tags during respective time periods. Insprired by previous research which suggest that artificial neural networks are superior forecasting models in this setting, we were able to create a system generating automated investment decisions on a daily, hourly and minutely time basis. The study concluded that price trends are indeed predictable, with a correct prediction rate above 50% for all models, and corrensponding profitable trading strategies for all currencies on an hourly basis when neglecting trading fees, buy-sell spreads and order delays. The overall highest predictability is obtained on the hourly trading interval for Bitcoin, yielding an accuracy of 55.74% and a cumulative return of 175.1% between October 16, 2021 and December 31, 2021. / I denna studie används ett bakåtpropagerande neoronnät (BPN) för att förutsäga prisrörelser i större kryptovalutor med hjälp av tekniska faktorer och kvantifiering av kollektivt sentimentet från mikrobloggnätverket Twitter. Vårt dataset består av dagliga, timvisa och minutvisa prisnivåer för Bitcoin, Ether och Litecoin tillsammans med 8 populära tekniska indikatorer, samt alla tweets med valutornas "cash tags" under respektive tidsperiod. Med inspiration från tidigare forskning som hävdar att artificiella nauronnät är överlägsna prognosmodeller i denna typ av analys kunde vi skapa ett system som genererar automatiska investeringsbeslut på daglig, timvis och minutvis basis. Vi hävdar med denna studie att pristrender är förutsägbara för dessa kryptovalutor, med en korrekt förutsägelsefrekvens på över 50% för alla modeller, och med lönsamma handelsstrategier för alla valutor på timbasis när man bortser från handelsavgifter, köp- och säljspreadar och orderfördröjningar. Den högsta förutsägbarheten erhålls på timhandelsintervallet för Bitcoin, vilket ger en nogrannhet på 55,74% och en ackumulerad avkastning på 175,1% mellan den 16 oktober 2021 och den 31 december 2021.

[pt] O presente estudo busca entender os principais determinantes da flutuação de preços do Bitcoin através de variáveis relacionadas à força de mercado, tecnologia, reconhecimento público e variáveis macroeconômicas, estimando os coeficientes do vetor de correção de erros (VECM) e do procedimento autoregressivo de defasagens distribuídas (ARDL). Os resultados apresentaram que o reconhecimento público não possui impactos significantes sobre o preço de mercado do Bitcoin, enquanto as forças de mercado, fatores tecnológicos e as variáveis macroêconomicas apresentam impacto significativo em pelo menos um dos modelos utilizados. / [en] The present study seeks to understand the main determinants of Bitcoin price fluctuation through variables related to market forces, technology, public recognition and macroeconomic variables, estimating the coefficients of the error correction vector (VECM) and the autoregressive procedure of distributed lags (ARDL). The results showed that public recognition does not have significant impacts on the market price of Bitcoin, while market forces, technological factors and macroeconomic variables have a significant impact on at least one of the models used.

[pt] O Bitcoin surgiu no fim da década passada. Desde então, emergiu uma nova classe de ativos: as criptomoedas. O ecossistema das moedas digitais vem avançando a passos largos, seja pelo surgimento de novas moedas, pelo nível de capitalização, pela escalada de investidores ou pelo expressivo desempenho em 2017. Dado o quadro, as criptomoedas se consolidam a cada dia como uma alternativa de investimento, tornando-se de vez uma rota do mercado financeiro. Por consequência, surge a necessidade de avaliar e estimar medidas de risco para esses ativos. Este estudo estimou os coeficientes Beta das quatorze maiores criptomoedas da economia – de acordo com o nível de capitalização – em relação à índices teóricos, com o fito de auxiliar os gestores de portfólios no apreçamento e na formatação de estratégias. Através de uma regressão de retornos passados destas moedas sobre os retornos dos índices de criptoativos, de ações e de uma cesta de moedas contra o dólar americano, estimou-se o Beta dos ativos. A partir das análises, concluiu-se que o Bitcoin possui elevada sensibilidade aos índices de criptomoedas, mesma condicionante para o Ethereum, porém com correlação mais branda aos referenciais, bem como ao próprio Bitcoin. Quantos às demais moedas, estas não exprimiram fator de risco associado aos índices de criptomoedas, visto os baixos coeficientes. Quando analisados os criptoativos em relação aos índices acionários e de moedas contra o dólar, constatou-se que os coeficientes foram iguais a zero. Portanto, o desempenho das criptomoedas, na janela de tempo estudada, possui relação involuntária às oscilações destes índices. / [en] Bitcoin has risen at the end of the last decade. Since then, a new class of assets emerged: the cryptocurrencies. The cryptocurrencies scenario has been advancing rapidly, by the emergence of new currencies, by the level of capitalization, either by the increase of investors or by its significant performance in 2017. Given the situation, cryptocurrencies keep consolidating itself every day as an investment alternative, becoming a permanent route for the financial market. Consequently, it becomes necessary to estimate risk measures for these assets. This study estimated the Beta coefficients of the largest cryptocurrencies – according to its capitalization level – in relation to theoretical indexes, in order to assist portfolios managers in pricing. Through a regression of past returns of virtual currencies on the returns of the cryptocurrencies indexes, stocks and a portfolio of currencies against the US dollar, the digital assets beta was estimated. From these analyses, it was possible to conclude that Bitcoin is significantly sensitive to cryptocurrencies indexes, the same condition for Ethereum, but with a softer correlation to the references, as well as Bitcoin itself. With respect to the other currencies, they did not express a relevant risk factor associated with cryptocurrencies indexes, due to low coefficient values. When analyzing the cryptocurrency in relation to the stock and currency indexes against the US dollar, it was noted that the coefficients were zero. Therefore, the digital currencies performance of this study, in the given timeframe, has an involuntary relation to the fluctuations of those indexes.

El presente trabajo de investigación tiene como principal objetivo el analizar el uso del Bitcoin como medio de pago en el Perú. El bitcoin es un moneda digital o criptomoneda esta es intangible y virtual que sirve como medio de intercambio de bienes y servicios como cualquier otra cualquier moneda del mundo donde esta sea aceptada, esta como tal no cuenta con un número de serie u otro mecanismo que permita rastrear a los vendedores y compradores que emplean esta divisa electrónica . Con respecto a la metodología empleada, se escogió un enfoque cualitativo, de tipo aplicada, de diseño no experimental y de nivel exploratorio; limitando a analizar la opinión de seis docentes especialistas en las materias de economías, finanzas y de derecho, de cinco usuarios y cinco no usuarios de Bitcoin con el propósito de obtener respuesta al fenómeno de estudio. La técnica empleada es la entrevista y como instrumento la guía de entrevista de adaptación propia validada por expertos, posteriormente la información obtenida fue revisada e interpretada, donde se llegó a la conclusión que el uso del Bitcoin como medio de pago en el Perú es nulo y no viable de momento debido a una gran serie de factores como la falta de regulaciones monetarias y legales, de igual modo la no necesidad por parte de los peruanos de colocar en circulación un nuevo medio de pago como lo es el Bitcoin. / The main objective of this research work is to analyze the use of Bitcoin as a payment method in the Perú. Bitcoin is a digital currency or cryptocurrency this is intangible and virtual that serves as a means of exchanging goods and services like any other any currency in the world where it is accepted, it as such does not have a serial number or other mechanism that allows track sellers and buyers using this electronic currency. Regarding the methodology used, a qualitative approach was chosen, of an applied type, with a non-experimental design and an exploratory level; limiting to analyze the opinion of six professors specialized in the subjects of economics, finance and law, of five users and five non-users of Bitcoin with the purpose of obtaining a response to the study phenomenon. The technique used is the interview and as an instrument the self-adapted interview guide validated by experts, subsequently the information obtained was then reviewed and interpreted, where it was concluded that the use of Bitcoin as a means of payment in Peru is null and void and not viable at the moment due to a number of factors such as the lack of monetary and legal regulations, as well as the lack of need for Peruvians to put into circulation a new means of payment such as Bitcoin.