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Top1. Introduction
Recent years have seen the development of many cryptographic currencies, also known as “cryptocurrencies”; thus: digital representation of value that can be exchanged online for goods and services as well as for speculation (Lewis, 2018). The first cryptocurrency to be introduced was Bitcoin in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (2019). Since then, approximately 7000 other cryptocurrencies have been introduced, about 3000 of which (e.g., DashRipple, Ethereum, LiteCoin, Monero, Tether, and Zerocash) are actively traded today. Many of them are basically clones of Bitcoin, although with different parameters such as different supplies and transaction validation times; others, instead, emerged from significant innovations of blockchain technology (e.g., electronic supplementary material) (ElBahrawy et al., 2017). However, Bitcoin currently dominates the market with a capitalization of about 600B U.S. dollars as at January 2021 (Coinmarketcap, 2021).
Briefly, cryptocurrencies work using a technology called blockchain: a decentralized system spread across many computers that manages and records transactions; in practice, this system works as a public ledger (DuPont, 2019). Thanks to that, individual users can send and receive native tokens, the ‘virtual coins’, while collectively validating the transactions via the blockchain (Lewis, 2018).
Stemming from the above innovative technology, there are some important benefits of exchanging cryptocurrencies (DuPont, 2019): i) the capacity to transfer and trade considerable amounts of money anonymously and quickly across the Internet; ii) the governmental free design, iii) the decentralized processing and recording system that can be more secure than traditional payment systems, and iv) the presence of very low transaction costs. On the other hand, according to the review of Corbet et al. (2019), there are three controversial features of cryptocurrencies: i) they are not domiciled in a specific country, leading to a huge problem of defining a regulatory alignment, ii) anonymity of users, lack of intermediary financial institutions, and the contemporary escalation in the use of darknet allowing cybercrime activities such as money-laundering (see Albrecht et al., 2019; Choo, 2015).
Due to these positive and negative facets of cryptocurrencies, Corbet et al. (2019; p. 190) highlighted their “main attraction appearing to be sourced in their role as a speculative asset” (see also Glaser et al., 2014). This is also supported by the fact that 70% of existing Bitcoins are held in dormant accounts (Weber, 2016) and that cryptocurrencies seem to exhibit speculative bubbles (Ammous, 2018; Cheah and Fry, 2015; Madey, 2017).
From the above, cryptocurrencies can be perceived as an opportunity or as a threat, leading to identify two main groups of cryptocurrency audience among investors (Yelowitz & Wilson, 2015): i) supporters (e.g., Blythe Masters, former Managing Director at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; Investopedia, 2019) who want to invest in them and believe in their speculative power, and ii) detractors (e.g., Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates founder; Forbes, 2020) who forecast a bubble for cryptocurrencies due to their near-to-zero real value. Despite the fact that both groups are formed by recognized investors, the question is to identify what inner factors discriminate them. In this vein, the research question at the basis of this work is: what are the behavioral and socio-demographic factors that influence the intention to invest in cryptocurrencies? This question has been already answered in some terms, but scholars have reached contrasting results. For example, Arias-Oliva et al. (2019) found that social influence and perceived risk do not affect the intention to invest in cryptocurrencies, while other scholars found contradictory findings (e.g., Bannier et al., 2019; Lammer et al., 2019; Pelster et al., 2019).