Understanding the creation of Trust in Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin

Compared to traditional financial services, cryptocurrencies lack any kind of institutional, monetary, or legal backing. Yet, the popularity of the cryptocurrencies remains intact despite several adversaries. In the context of lacking basic premises as a financial tool, these cryptocurrencies provide security and earn users’ trust via under-lying technologies. Despite the presence of a plethora of research in both trust and cryptocurrencies, there is a clear lack of research on what factors of the underlying technology drive trust. To uncover the factors contrib-uting to building trust, we analyzed 1.97 million discussion posts related to Bitcoin, the oldest and most widely used cryptocurrency. From the theory, we found out that functionality, reliability, and helpfulness are the con-structs to evaluate the trust in technology. Based on our analysis, we discovered 11 different factors related to three constructs of technology garnering users’ trust in Bitcoins. Our results highlight factors that require attention to developing new technologies that users can trust.