Beth Bailey

[bensoltoff]

Might the topic difference be because ethereum is still very much in the startup time period? Whereas bitcoin is already more established. What if you compared r/bitcoin in its first year of existence to r/ethereum in its first year of existence? Would you still expect to see differences in major topics?

[rickecon]

• Why do you care about the difference between bitcoin and etherium communities? How did you come up with this idea? Maybe you can motivate this a little better.
• Cool tracking of people's outside affiliations.
• I am mostly interested in the question of whether the differences in communities affects crypto price.

[bethbailey]

@bensoltoff Great idea. A couple of thoughts on it - (1) Ethereum is actually not very "startup" as far as cryptocurrencies go. It's the second largest cryptocurrency, even though it trails bitcoin greatly in price and market cap. I think the results are definitely influenced by the relative youth and smaller size of ethereum, but it's a difficult question. (2) Unfortunately, bitcoin wasn't on reddit when it started up, and that comparison would have so many confounders because it was the first cryptocoin. So, a comparison of the first year of existence isn't possible. I tried to get at the possible effects of youth of cryptocurrencies by conducting the comparison of the two time periods. I think future research could compare ethereum to other, newer and smaller coins.

@rickecon Thanks for the comments! I didn't get to go over the motivations of the research because of the time constraint of the presentation, but you're right - I should have included it more. I find this research interesting because these coins and blockchain technology are at the intersection of a lot of fields I'm interested in - finance, economics, sociology, technology, and politics. The research on them is limited (but growing quickly), and totally inconclusive. Most researchers don't even know how to classify them - a currency? investment? technology? scam? fad? How are we supposed to value them if we don't know these things? I think we might be able to start to understand them better if we do an analysis of the ways people talk about them, and how that differs in the communities. I chose these two communities because they are the largest and very influential.

As for how differences in communities influences price -- I definitely think it these things are related, in some seen ways (like ethereum maintainers making choices in the platform that aren't pro-trading) and unseen ways, like information flows. But it's difficult to make a causal claim, because there's such a short time period of price data and so much noise.