ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
As the first decentralized digital currency introduced in 2009 together with the blockchain, Bitcoin offers new opportunities both for developed and developing countries. Bitcoin peer-to-peer transactions are independent of the banking system, thus facilitating foreign exchanges with low transaction fees such as remittances, with a high degree of anonymity. These opportunities together with other key factors led the Bitcoin to become extremely popular and made its price skyrocket during 2017. However, while the Bitcoin blockchain attracts a lot of attention, it remains difficult to investigate where this attention comes from, due to the pseudo-anonymity of the system, and consequently to appreciate its social impact. Here we make an attempt to characterize the adoption of the bitcoin blockchain by country. In the first part of the work we show that information about the number of Bitcoin software client downloads, the IP addresses that act as relays for the transactions, and the Internet searches about Bitcoin provide together a coherent picture of the system evolution in different countries. Using these quantities as a proxy for user adoption, we identified several socio-economic indexes such as the GDP per capita, freedom of trade and the Internet penetration as key variables correlated with the degree of user adoption. In the second part of the work, we build a network of Bitcoin transactions between countries using the IP addresses of nodes relaying transactions and we develop an augmented version of the gravity model of trade in order to identify socio-economic factors linked to the flow of bitcoins between countries. In a nutshell our study provides a new insight on the bitcoin adoption by country and on the potential socio-economic drivers of the international bitcoin flow.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that popularized rapidly in recent years. Usually, we need to query the complete history of Bitcoin blockchain data to acquire variables with economic meaning. This becomes increasingly difficult no
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every new inven
In this essay, I attempt to provide supporting evidence as well as some balance for the thesis on `Transforming socio-economics with a new epistemology presented by Hollingworth and Mueller (2008). First, I review a personal highlight of my own scien
Socio-economic inequality is measured using various indices. The Gini ($g$) index, giving the overall inequality is the most commonly used, while the recently introduced Kolkata ($k$) index gives a measure of $1-k$ fraction of population who possess
We propose a general scenario to analyze social and economic changes in modern environments. We illustrate the ideas with a model that incorporating the main trends is simple enough to extract analytical results and, at the same time, sufficiently co