Users’ perception toward Bitcoin Green with big data analytics

Abstract

Purpose

Nowadays, Bitcoin is facing many environmental problems arising from the proof of work based on blockchain. For this reason, Bitcoin Green (BITG) has been created and would solve these issues. The purpose of this paper is to visualize the users’ perception toward BITG through Twitter text analysis.

Design/methodology/approach

The big data used in this study includes two sources. The first data were extracted from the “Google Trends” engine during the period between 20 September 2015 and 15 September 2020. The second data were extracted from the Twitter application. This research explores the perceived ease of use, the perceived usefulness, the social influence, the perceived control and the user attitudes toward BITG. Therefore, lexicon-based sentiment analysis techniques combined with different dictionaries are built to visualize the drivers of investor attitudes toward the BITG using Twitter text messages. Besides, this study has checked the validity of two main assumptions using the normality (Jarque-Bera) and Kruskal-Wallis rank sum tests capable to conclude whether users mostly perceive BITG as a sustainable technology.

Findings

This empirical work affords insights into users’ intentions by exploring the drivers of BITG perception. The results show that users positively perceive the use of BITG as a sustainable blockchain. Besides, its usefulness is more appreciated from its ethical and technological characteristics, and its perceived application is mainly based on investment and coin offering use. Similarly, users are mostly showing positive emotions toward BITG.

Research limitations/implications

Tweets related to “BITG” are not as voluminous as the other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which make it difficult to extract all the characteristics and use cases.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first one that uses the theory of planned behavior and the theory of acceptance model to explore cognitive factors in understanding investor intentions in adopting BITG.

Citation

Mnif, E., Lacombe, I. and Jarboui, A. (2021), "Users’ perception toward Bitcoin Green with big data analytics", Society and Business Review, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 592-615. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-02-2021-0016