By Troy Cross
Compiled by: TechFlow
I’m very proud of this report on Bitcoin ownership. Our survey of 3,538 adults in the U.S. found that:
Covering the entire political identity spectrum
Prefers young and male
Weakly associated with a unique configuration of moral values
Strong correlation with Bitcoin knowledge
We wanted to understand who holds Bitcoin, who doesn’t, and why. This required going deeper. Not just surface-level statistics, but digging into the roots of our psychosocial identities. Many frameworks claim to do this, but my research partner @andrewwperkins chose “moral foundations” and designed a comprehensive set of questions. We then hired a professional firm to help us achieve a representative sample.
As every Bitcoiner knows, true randomness is hard to get, but we think even visually you can see we did a pretty good job of getting a fairly representative sample across several dimensions. And the sample size is large, 3,538 people.
Demographics
We found no strong correlations across many dimensions—race, ethnicity, religion, relationship status, income, education, or financial literacy—with holding Bitcoin. Age and gender were the exceptions. Bitcoin holders in the United States tend to be young and male.
politics
A surprising part of what shapes American identity and behavior is politics. It seems that our political divisions are not only deepening, but are becoming the most important fact about identity, surpassing all other factors. So we asked in five different ways:
What we found was absolutely the most shocking. Like most people on this app, our media critics, academics who write about Bitcoin, and nearly all politicians, we assumed that Bitcoin holdings would skew the political right and libertarian. Wrong!
The Bitcoin holders in our sample look almost the same as non-Bitcoin holders: mostly moderates! They are still more likely than non-holders to lean toward the political extremes, whether liberal or conservative. (Statistically significant but small.)
Even stranger, those who self-identify as “very liberal,” or position themselves far to the left on a 10-point scale, are the most likely to own Bitcoin relative to other political identities.
Note that the chart above is not saying that there are more very liberal Bitcoin holders than people of other political identities. That is not the case. Most Bitcoin holders are moderates. What it means is that if you randomly picked a very liberal person and a moderate person, the liberal is more likely to hold Bitcoin.
In terms of “moral foundations,” we know that liberals and conservatives have different values. For example, liberals place more emphasis on “caring,” while conservatives place more emphasis on “loyalty.” We wanted to see which side Bitcoin holders lean toward. It turns out that they have both.
Finally, we explore the questions of whether people understand Bitcoin, trust Bitcoin, think Bitcoin is useful, and think Bitcoin is good. We asked 4 questions for each aspect. The results show that Bitcoin holders differ significantly from non-holders of all political affiliations on these dimensions.
Looking specifically at trust and perceived morality, you can clearly see a stark contrast between those who hold Bitcoin and those who do not.
These four factors: Trust, Knowledge, Utility, and Perceived Morality, are the strongest correlates with Bitcoin holdings in our data. They also have strong correlations with each other. Here you can see how these factors compare to the Moral Foundation.
To summarize our findings, I quote the conclusion of our report:
“Given our polarized political discussions, one might argue that Bitcoin ownership is an identity, especially one that reflects political leanings.”
But we found that this is not the case. Bitcoin holders are politically similar to other Americans: most are moderate, with only a small number of conservatives and liberals.
Bitcoin holders are similar to other Americans in most demographics, with one notable exception: They tend to be younger and male.
What is most strongly correlated with Bitcoin holding is not who you are, but how much you know about Bitcoin and whether you think it is useful, trustworthy, and good.
It turns out that the 14% of Americans who own Bitcoin are not members of a particular political faction. Rather, they are regular Americans who have taken the time to research the technology and have formed a positive attitude toward it.
(For complete application, please refer to: https://thenakamotoproject.org)
