Thread by @thetrocro

1/n I'm really proud of this report on bitcoin ownership.
Our survey of 3,538 adults in the US found bitcoin ownership:
-covers the full spectrum of political identity
-is skewed young and male
-correlates weakly with a unique profile of moral values
-correlates strongly with knowledge of bitcoin
🧵

2/n We wanted to understand who owns bitcoin and who doesn't, and why. That called for research. Not just surface-level demographics, but a deep look into the roots of our psycho-social identities.

Many frameworks claim to do this, but my research partner, @andrewwperkins chose "moral foundations" and designed a comprehensive series of questions.

We then we employed a professional firm to help us achieve a representative sample.

3/n As every bitcoiner knows, true randomness is hard to come by, but we think even visually you can see that we did pretty well along several dimensions in achieving something fairly representative. And it's a large n, 3,538 people.

4/n Demographics. We found no strong correlations across many dimensions--race, ethnicity, religion, relationship status, income, education, or financial literacy--with owning bitcoin. Age and gender were the exception. Bitcoin owners in the US tend to be young and male.

5/n Politics. Part of what shapes identity and behavior in America--surprise surprise--is political orientation. Our political divide seems not only to be deepening, but also becoming the most important fact about identity, the one that trumps all others. So we polled it 5 different ways:

6/n What we found was definitely our most shocking result. Like most everyone on this app, our critics in the media, academics who write about bitcoin, and almost all politicians, we thought bitcoin ownership would skew towards the political right, and towards libertarianism.
Wrong!

7/n Bitcoin owners looked pretty much like the non-bitcoin owners in our sample: mostly moderate! They were still a bit more prone to the political extremes on both liberal and the conservative, than non-owners. (Statistically significant but small.)

8/n Even stranger was that people who self-identified as "very liberal" or on a 10-point scale, located themselves at the far left, were the most likely to own bitcoin, relative to other political identities. Look at this. Look...

9/n Note that the above chart is not saying that more bitcoiners are very liberal than any other political identity. They're not. Most bitcoiners are moderates. It's saying that if you randomly pick someone very liberal and randomly pick someone who is moderate, the liberal will be more likely to own bitcoin.

10/n On "moral foundations" we knew that liberals and conservatives have distinct profiles. For example, liberals value "care" more than conservatives, and conservatives value "loyalty" more than liberals. We wanted to see which bitcoin owners resembled. Turns out it's both.

11/n Finally, we turned to questions about whether people know about bitcoin, trust it, think it's useful, and think it's good. We asked 4 questions on each of these. And we found that here, bitcoin owners differed dramatically from non-owners of all political stripes.

12/n Zooming in on trust and perceived morality, you can really see the stark contrast between those who own bitcoin and those who don't.

13/n These four factors--trust, knowledge, utility, and perceived morality--were the strongest correlations in our data with bitcoin ownership. They also correlated with each other. Here, you can see these factors compared to moral foundations.

14/n To summarize our findings I'm going to quote from the conclusion of our report:
From our polarized political discourse, one might be tempted to think that Bitcoin ownership is a kind of identity, and especially a kind of identity that reflects political orientation.

15/n We found that not to be the case. Bitcoin owners are politically just like the rest of America: mostly moderate, with smaller conservative and liberal contingents.

16/n Bitcoin owners look like other Americans in most demographic respects, with one striking exception: they tend to be younger and male.

17/n What correlates most strongly with Bitcoin ownership is not who you are, so to speak, but how much you know about Bitcoin, and whether you think it is useful, trustworthy, and good.

18/n The 14% of Americans who own Bitcoin, it turns out, are not members of some particular political tribe. Rather, they are simply Americans who have taken the time to study the technology and formed positive attitudes about it.

19/n Thanks for reading. You can download the report at and please give us a follow @NakamotoProjct.thenakamotoproject.org