Bitcoin research across disciplines

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, research on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has snowballed across many disciplines: technical fields, economics, law, public policy, finance, accounting, and others. As the uses of blockchain technology behind Bitcoin expand, more disciplines will be drawn to its study and the research will greatly expand. This paper provides an assessment of the current state of the literature. From a comprehensive search of the literature that resulted in an original sample of 13,507 results, a final sample of 1,206 papers on Bitcoin are categorised and mapped across six disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Bitcoin
• blockchain
• cryptocurrency
• digital currency
• research
• literature

Notes

1. We include the most recent version of working papers subsequently revised or published, so some publications bear the date 2017.

2. Numbers in square brackets refer to the database IDs in Table 1.

3. Liu (2016) sourced the articles for his co-word analysis of Bitcoin exclusively from the Scopus database.

4. However, as explained in a later section, many of the search results from SpringerLink have to be discarded.

5. We do not specifically examine Econpapers due to the substantial overlap with IDEAS.

6. Despite selecting desired types, other types nevertheless appear in the results. These are considered in the next section.

7. This is especially important for the “Categorisation of Papers in Collection” section, where we assign each entry to a category. For papers that do not have an abstract – such as articles in law journals – we refer to the article's introduction to determine the focus of the article. The SpringerLink database does not provide abstracts, and here papers not indicating ‘Bitcoin’ in the resulting downloaded entry record are discarded.

8. ‘An Epic List of Bitcoin Research’: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VaWhbAj7hWNdiE73P-W-wrl5a0WNgzjofmZXe0Rh5sg/edit#gid=0 (accessed August 5, 2017).

9. Smith + Crown published research repository: https://www.smithandcrown.com/research-search/ (accessed August 5, 2017).

10. These attacks are designed to prevent legitimate users from accessing a desired service. With a distributed denial-of-service (DDos) the incoming traffic flooding the victim's site comes from multiple sources, making it impossible to stop by blocking a single IP address.

11. On the website coinmarketcap.com there were 1,017 altcoins listed on July 29, 2017.

12. ‘Norway's Largest Online Bank Integrates Bitcoin Accounts’, by Jamie Redman, May 15, 2017 https://news.bitcoin.com/norways-online-bank-bitcoin-accounts/ (accessed May 28, 2017).

13. ‘Bitcoin going mainstream as Japanese business signs on’, Nikkei Asian Review, May 23, 2017.

14. On January 11, 2017, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) announced it is going to be carrying out inspections on Bitcoin enterprises in the country. https://cointelegraph.com/news/chinas-central-bank-is-raiding-bitcoin-operators-bitcoin-price-is-tumbling (accessed December 3, 2017)

On January 26, 2017, the PBOC announced it will continue its investigation into the country's Bitcoin exchanges focusing on payments and settlement, money laundering, foreign currency exchange, and information and fund security. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2017-01/26/content_28057727.htm. (accessed December 3, 2017)

The PBOC continued putting pressure on Bitcoin Exchanges in China during 2017, influencing Bitcoin trading in China.