The coin that never sleeps. The privacy preserving usage of Bitcoin in a longitudinal analysis as a speculative asset

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Bitcoin's role as a speculative asset, examining its transaction privacy, market stability, and comparison with traditional stock markets, revealing insights into its usage patterns and resilience to external political events.

Contribution

It provides a longitudinal analysis of Bitcoin's transaction privacy, market behavior, and compares its investment landscape with traditional stock markets, highlighting unique features and stability aspects.

Findings

Most Bitcoin addresses are used securely and privately.

Bitcoin's 24/7 market is unaffected by offline political incidents.

Specific longitudes dominate transaction volume, but not coin transfer volume.

Abstract

Bitcoin is the first and undoubtedly most successful cryptocurrecny to date with a market capitalization of more than 100 billion dollars. Today, Bitcoin has more than 100,000 supporting merchants and more than 3 million active users. Besides the trust it enjoys among people, Bitcoin lacks of a basic feature a substitute currency must have: stability of value. Hence, although the use of Bitcoin as a mean of payment is relative low, yet the wild ups and downs of its value lure investors to use it as useful asset to yield a trading profit. In this study, we explore this exact nature of Bitcoin aiming to shed light in the newly emerged and rapid growing marketplace of cryptocurencies and compare the investmet landscape and patterns with the most popular traditional stock market of Dow Jones. Our results show that most of Bitcoin addresses are used in the correct fashion to preserve security and privacy of the transactions and that the 24/7 open market of Bitcoin is not affected by any political incidents of the offline world, in contrary with the traditional stock markets. Also, it seems that there are specific longitudes that lead the cryptocurrency in terms of bulk of transactions, but there is not the same correlation with the volume of the coins being transferred.