Attitudes are based on motivations and are formed in anticipation that the person will handle similar information at a later date. Attitudes are, therefore, necessary collections of pre-determined behavioral intents toward certain information (Solomon et al., 2016). Attitudes and their underlying functions form using a hierarchical structure where certain elements hold the primacy of effect over the remainder. These elements affect, behavior, and cognition as presented by Solomon and colleagues (Solomon et al., 2016). This study aims to explore how investors form attitudes towards the adoption of unfamiliar attitude objects, specifically when confronted with communications regarding Bitcoin adoption. The reason for this study is threefold; firstly, congruent academia has only conducted temperature checks on already established attitudes towards Bitcoin from diverse crowds in a spread of non-western cultures (Gagarina et al., 2019; Anser et al., 2020). Secondly, the aforementioned studies incorporated loosely defined sample groups. Understanding technology adoption, following the theories of Rogers (1995), requires that inaugural research is done on those who are most likely to adopt the technology. Lastly, congruent research has yet to tackle attitude formation on Bitcoin as an asset. Established research all commit to researching already established attitudes on a less niched sample (Gagarina et al., 2019; Yoo et al., 2020). The conclusion of said studies found thematic, contextual antecedents to why certain participants had certain attitudes. However, these studies do not explore the underlying hierarchy or function of said attitudes. To fill such a gap, a study following a deductive, exploratory nature was developed. Through thematic coding of qualitative interviews, this study contributes to the existing literature in two aspects: first, active Swedish investors rely on affective reasoning when faced with this particular unfamiliar attitude object. Second, such affective reasoning is most likely a result of participants defaulting to the grouping of information within the knowledge function, as no cognitive baseline (in the form of understanding price developments in Bitcoin) could be established. The general attitude formation followed an affective dominant, low-involvement hierarchy created through the knowledge function.

Författare: Sandra Medenica & Frida Stark Handledare: Joakim Persson Bakgrund: Kontantanvändningen i Sverige idag har minskat i takt med den digitala utvecklingen vilket har skapat plats för nya betalningsmöjligheter, exempelvis kryptovalutor och e-valutor. Samtidigt håller Riksbanken på att utreda möjligheten för en e-krona som skulle medföra att Riksbanken kan reglera penningpolitiken på ett mer effektivt sätt samt bibehålla sin monopolställning som ensam utgivare av pengar på betalningsmarknaden.  Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka vilka effekter en e-krona skulle ha på samhället samt om det finns ett samband mellan priset på Bitcoin och länders intresse för att införa en CBDC.  Metod: Uppsatsen grundar sig på litteraturstudier och ekonomiska teorier för att analysera ekonomiska effekter av en e-krona i Sverige. Utöver det genomförs en regressionsanalys för att härleda ett eventuellt potentiellt samband med data som visar Bitcoinkursen och länders intresse för ett införande av Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC.  Slutsats: En e-krona skulle medföra att Riksbanken lättare kan genomföra penningpolitiska åtgärder för att stimulera ekonomin samt att de skulle fortsätta bidra med konkurrens på betalningsmarknaden. Affärsbankerna skulle eventuellt kunna påverkas av en undanträngningseffekt i form av att bankinlåningarna minskar vilket leder till att de skulle förlora en del av sin ställning på betalningsmarknaden. Utöver det skulle de kriminella verksamheterna kunna minska när kontanterna fasas ut då de anonyma betalningsmöjligheterna blir färre.  Det finns ett positivt uppskattat samband mellan Bitcoinkursen och länders intresse för ett införande av en CBDC med en korrelation på 0,52. Det innebär att när Bitcoinkursen stiger kommer även länders intresse för en CBDC öka. Detta kan vara en förklaring till ländernas intresse, men fler variabler bör tas i beaktning vid vidare analys. / Authors: Sandra Medenica & Frida Stark Supervisor: Joakim Persson Background: Today´s use of cash in Sweden has decreased along with the digital development, which has created space for new payment options, such as cryptocurrencies and e-currencies. Along with this development, the central bank of Sweden is investigating the possibility of an e-krona, which would allow the central bank of Sweden to regulate the monetary policy in a more efficient way and maintain its monopoly position as the sole issuer of money in the payment market. Purpose: The aim of this essay is to investigate what effects an e-krona would have on society and whether there is a correlation between the price of Bitcoin and countries' interest in introducing a CBDC. Completion: The essay is based on literature studies and economic theories to analyze the economic effects of an e-krona in Sweden. In addition, a regression analysis is performed to deduce a possible correlation with the data showing the Bitcoin exchange rate and countries' interest in the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency, CBDC. Conclusions: An e-krona would mean that the Riksbank could more easily implement monetary policy measures to stimulate the economy and that they would continue to contribute to competition in the payment market. The commercial banks could possibly be affected by a crowding-out effect in the form of reduced bank deposits, which leads to them losing part of their position in the payment market. In addition, the criminal activities could decrease when the cash is phased out as the anonymous payment options become fewer. There is a positive estimated effect of the bitcoin exchange rate on countries interest of a CBDC with a correlation of 0,52. In other words, when the bitcoin exchange rate rises there is an increase in the countries interest of a CBDC. This might be an explanation for the interest, however, more variables should be considered in the analysis.

El intercambio de las personas, en relación a los bienes y servicios, registra modificaciones, de medios y lugares; se aprecia el trueque, el patrón de metales preciosos, el papel de los chinos del siglo IX, …, también, como se pasa de las plazas de las ciudades, los buques, …, a la internet. Las personas fueron depositando confianza en cada cambio que se registra en la historia. Estos cambios llegan el día de hoy a las denominadas monedas virtuales o criptomonedas. Esto es lo que origina el objetivo del presente trabajo, desarrollar una propuesta para que el uso del Bitcoin sea empleado como medio de pago en las empresas peruanas. Para ello, se consideró la entrevista a personas que usan Bitcoin en sus transacciones comerciales en el Perú y la entrevista desarrollada a 61 empresarios escogidos bajo la muestra de conveniencia, ubicados en la ciudad de Arequipa. La criptomoneda más empleada es el Bitcoin que aparece en el 2009. Las criptomonedas no tienen ley, ni le pertenecen a nadie, es solo la confianza que se tiene en estas, las que pueden hacerla posicionar. Para lograr mejorar esta confianza, se proponen estrategias de comunicación y capacitación, para crear una oportunidad alguna persona, natural o jurídica, que apoye a las empresas que deseen hacer uso del Bitcoin, siendo el 4.9% del total que existen. Las empresas que usan bitcoin, los motiva el hecho que un cliente desee pagar con ello y la falta de conocimiento, es la principal causa para que no lo usen. / The exchange of people, in relation to goods and services, registers changes, of means and places; Barter is appreciated, the pattern of precious metals, the role of the Chinese of the ninth century, ..., also, as it passes from the squares of the city, ships, ..., to the internet. People were placing confidence in every change that is recorded in the story. These changes come today to so-called virtual currencies or cryptocurrencies. This is what originates the objective of this work, to develop a proposal so that the use of Bitcoin is used as a means of payment in Peruvian companies. For this, the interview was considered to people who use Bitcoin in their commercial transactions in Peru and the interview developed to 61 businessmen chosen under the convenience sample, located in the city of Arequipa. The most used cryptocurrency is the Bitcoin that appears in 2009. The cryptocurrencies have no law, nor belong to anyone, it is only the confidence that you have in these, which can make it position. In order to improve this trust, communication and training strategies are proposed, to create an opportunity for any individual, natural or legal, that supports companies that wish to use Bitcoin, 4.9% of the total that exist. Companies that use bitcoin, are motivated by the fact that a customer wants to pay with it and the lack of knowledge, is the main cause for not using it. / Trabajo de investigación

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one of the latest in a long list of digital technologies, which appear to be heading towards a new industrial revolution. DLT has become very popular with the publication of the Bitcoin Blockchain in 2008. However, when we consider its suitability for dynamic networking environments, such as the Internet of Things, issues like transaction fees, scalability, and offline accessibility have not been resolved. The IOTA Foundation has designed the IOTA protocol, which is the data and value transfer layer for the Machine Economy. IOTA protocol uses an alternative blockless Blockchain which claims to solve the previous problems: the Tangle. This thesis first inquires into the theoretical concepts of both technologies Tangleand Blockchain, to understand them and identify the reasons to be compatible or not with the Internet of Things networking environments. After the analysis, the thesis focuses on the proposed implementation as a solution to address the connectivity issue suffered by the IOTA network. The answer to the problem is the development of a Neighbor Discovery algorithm, which has been designed to fulfill the requirements demanded by the IOTA application. Dealing with IOTA network setup can be very interesting for the community that is looking for new improvements at each release. Testing the solution in a peer-to-peer specific protocol (PeerSim), with different networking scenarios, allowed us to get valuable and more realistic information. Thus, after analyzing the results, we were able to determine the appropriate IOTA network configuration to build a more reliable and long-lasting network.

Access to finance is often a vital tool for a company to make investments which in turn leads to increased generation of income. In 2022, the amount of lending to non-financial companies increased by around 13 %. Banks' traditional lending channels have recently been challenged by DeFi. Within DeFi, no central intermediary is used, the security provided is cryptocurrencies and the transaction history is public. The most common cryptocurrency used in DeFi is bitcoin. At the time of writing, bitcoin has a market capitalization of approximately $521 million. The use of DeFi has grown rapidly in 2022 as cryptocurrencies worth just under $110 billion were pledged in DeFi as collateral for credit. The EBA has previously warned about the risks of cryptocurrencies. Despite warnings, neither case law nor any clear legislation regarding cryptocurrencies and creditors protection has thus been created. Though, there is a proposal from EU that will create a uniform regulation for cryptocurrencies that are not currently covered by the EU's existing regulatory framework for financial services, the so-called MiCA regulation. In Swedish legislation, there is an ongoing investigation on how to handle cryptocurrencies. However, neither the proposals at EU-level nor national level deal with substantive legal aspects such as creditors protection. The purpose of the thesis is to present a proposal for what bitcoin as property is classified as according to Swedish law and to identify the most appropriate legal aspect when bitcoins are used within DeFi. Based on the purpose, the following questions arise (i) What type of property should the cryptocurrency bitcoin be legally classified as? (ii) How can creditor protection be achieved when a transaction with bitcoin is made? (iii) How can creditor protection be achieved when bitcoin is used as collateral? In this thesis, the legal dogmatic method and law analogies will be used to answer the questions. The conclusions are that bitcoin should first be seen as a financial instrument according to MiFID II and creditor protection in the case of acquired ownership of bitcoins can basically never be achieved. Creditor protection in case of retained ownership can be achieved with analogous application of RVL and using registration as an element of property rights. When bitcoin is used as collateral, creditor protection can be achieved through the property right element of registration or tradition. In the case of three-party escrow, notification of transfer of claim must be made to the person who holds the pledged property in accordance with the 1936 Pawn Law.

This thesis aims to fit and compare different time series models namely the ARIMA-model, conditional heteroscedastic models and lastly a dynamic regression model with ARIMA error to Bitcoin closing price data that spans over 5 consecutive years. The purpose is to evaluate if the sanction on Russia had any effect on the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. After giving a very brief introduction to time series models and the nature of the error term, we describe the models that we want to compare. Quite early in on, autocorrelation was detected and that the time series were nonstationary. Additionally, as we are dealing with financial data, we found that the best alternative was to transform the data into logarithmic return and we then took the first difference. As we then detected a very large outlier, we decided to replace the extreme value with the mean of the two adjacent observations as we suspected it would affect the forecast interval. The dataset with first differenced log-returns was used in the ARIMA model but it turned out that there was no autocorrelation which indicated that returns in financial assets are uncorrelated across time and therefore unpredictable. The conditional heteroscedastic models, the ARCH and the GARCH models turned out to be best suitable for our data, as there was an ARCH-effect present. We could conclude that the GARCH(1,1) model using student t-distribution had the best fit, which had the lowest AIC and the highest log likelihood. In order to study the effect of the sanctions on Bitcoin volatility a dynamic regression model was used by allowing the error term to contain autocorrelation and include an independent dummy variable. The model showed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not, surprisingly, have any effect on the Bitcoin closing price.

Bitcoin scams cause billions of dollars worth of damage every year, targeting both large corporations as well as individuals. A commonly used method for these scams is spam emails. These emails all share the same intention of trying to trick people into sending Bit- coin to the address attached in the emails, which can be done using various methods like threats and social engineering. This thesis investigates Bitcoin spam emails and tries to dis- tinguish the characteristics of the successful ones. The study was conducted by collecting data on 250,000+ Bitcoin addresses from emails that have all been reported as spam to the Bitcoinabuse website. These addresses were analyzed using their number of transactions and final balance, which were extracted with a Python script using Blockchain’s public API. It was found that the successful Bitcoin spam emails only made up a tiny percentage of the entire data set. Looking at the most successful subset of spams, a few key aspects were found that distinguished them from the rest. The most successful spam emails were using blackmail techniques such as sextortion and ransomware to fool their victims. This method is believed to work so well because of the emotional response it invokes from the victims, which in many cases is enough for them to fold. In addition, luck seemed to play a rather big role for the scams to work. The emails had to reach the perfect target: a per- son that would fall for the trick, have money to send as well as the knowledge to buy and transfer Bitcoin. To increase the odds of finding these types of people, the scammers send emails in large volumes.

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Background: The emerging cryptocurrency market becomes more and more recognized around the globe. Therefore, it has become of great interest to policymakers, institutional investors, and individual investors. The new encrypted blockchain technology offers individual investors contemporary opportunities to invest contrary to traditional means. However, the volatile market presents instabilities and uncertainty for market participants creating a research gap for academics to investigate what poses these difficulties.  Purpose: The objective of the study is to investigate the determinants that affect individual investors' adoption intention of Bitcoin. By incorporating theories to understand investment behaviors and attitudes.  Methodology: The thesis utilized a quantitative methodology and collected data through an online questionnaire with the help of a Likert-scale instrument. The survey participants ended with a number of 114 respondents that are characterized as young adult investors. Interpretation and evaluation of the results were analyzed through an OLS linear regression with the help of a software program, Minitab.  Findings: Theresearchquestionwasansweredtoasatisfactorylevel,whereresultsattested to past works of literatures. The study found that consumer characteristic is a driving cause for individual investors' adoption intention of Bitcoin. To elaborate, subjective norms of individuals navigate their attitude towards Bitcoin, and investors’ peers’ opinions and acceptance play a crucial role in their engagement in the market. The herding trend was the most significant variable that contributed to investors’ adoption intention. The results also showed a significant correlation toward the technology acceptance model. Nonetheless, the study lacked empirical evidence to support market characteristics steering private investors’ adoption intention.  Implications & Future Research suggestions: The main implications of the study were factors that regarded data collection and methods. Due to a time limitation, the survey was not available for a longer period of time, a longitudinal study could be of interest whilst incorporating more consumer characteristics into the analysis. In addition, future scholars ought to focus on market characteristics and how they influence varying cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Tether alongside Bitcoin. To conclude, a larger scope of the study could bring about more significant results and interesting findings.

The interest in blockchain technology has risen dramatically in a short period of time. Conceptualized by the release of Bitcoin in 2008, the technology has grown at a steady pace, gaining traction over time with the interest of a large number o f industries. This paper explores the current state of the blockchain research space, providing a thorough description of the technology and its fundamental features. A literature study was conducted with the aim of defining a blockchain, where the result shows that two main characteristics are present; A blockchain is a data structure storing information in blocks where each block references the previous block. Further, data is distributed among blockchain network participants. Furthermore, this paper showcases the versatility of the technology by proposing a blockchain based model for digital voting at general meetings. While the model managed to provide a transparent means of tallying and verifying the outcome of a vote, it should be noted that a compromise had to be made in terms of trusting a third party. / Intresset för blockkedjeteknologin har ökat dramatiskt under en kort tid. Tekniken, som konceptualiserades i samband med utgåvan av Bitcoin 2008, har vuxit med en jämn takt, och har erhållit momentum i samband med att flera större branscher har visat sitt intresse. Denna rapport utforskar det rådande tillståndet i forskningsutrymmet, och erbjuder en utförlig beskrivning av tekniken och dess grundläggande egenskaper. En litteraturstudie genomfördes med målet att definiera blockkedjan, där resultatet visade att två huvudsakliga karaktärsdrag fanns; En blockkedja är en datastruktur som lagrar information i block, där varje block refererar till det föregående. Vidare distribueras data till blockkedjenätverkets deltagare. Dessutom visar denna rapport på teknikens mångsidighet genom att föreslå en blockkedjebaserad modell för digital röstning i bolagsstämmor. Samtidigt som modellen lyckades erbjuda en transparent metod att räkna och verifiera röstresultatet i ett val, så bör det noteras att en kompromiss var tvungen att genomföras gällande förtroendet till en tredje part.