INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

2020, VOL. 24, NO. 4, 474–496

https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2020.1806469

Sources of Cryptocurrency Value Systems: The Case of Bitcoin

Stephen C. Wingreena, Donncha Kavanaghb, Paul John Ennisb, and Gianluca Miscioneb
a
Department of Accounting and Information Systems, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand;
b
UCD College of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT KEY WORDS AND PHRASES

Cryptocurrencies are a hotly debated topic because it is not clear why Abductive reasoning; Bitcoin;
they should be valued as they are. Bitcoin, by far the most prominent concourse theory;
cryptocurrency, currently trades around $9,500 USD. “Why is Bitcoin cryptocurrency;
Q-methodology; Q-sort;
valuable?” is a question often heard but seldom answered well. It is
subjective value; value; value
not the legal tender of any nation, nor does it represent anything of systems; virtual currency
physical or intrinsic value. Some people attribute its value to its scarcity,
others to its anonymity, and others to its immutability, all of which are
created and managed by a computer algorithm. Current theories fail to
explain Bitcoin’s value, or it is not immediately apparent how they might
explain it. We are therefore motivated to investigate the sources of
cryptocurrency value through the emergent value systems of the
Bitcoin community. We use concourse theory and Q-methodology to
discover five types of Bitcoin value systems that are complementary and
coexisting facets of a collective whole, each type being its own internally
consistent “theory” of value, and therefore our typology avoids simplistic
generalizations about cryptocurrencies and the motivations behind
those involved. We named the types: Fintech, Libertarians, Purists,
Average Joe, and Gentrifier. Of interest, four of the five types we identi­
fied appear not to value Bitcoin for its monetary or market value, despite
what is usually assumed. Instead, Bitcoin is associated with its potential
as an alternative currency that may be used to exchange value, to
mitigate various forms of risk, or as a force for social and cultural change.
These five types may also underlie broader digital innovation processes
and provide a basis from which to understand them.

Value is perhaps the most central and pervasive topic of all business and economic research,
yet it remains persistently difficult to define, both conceptually and operationally. Hence, we
foreground the question, What is value? One might posit that value has an “objective”
reality and that rational decision makers pursue objectively rational concepts of value [10],
such as economic value (e.g., price, dollar value, bottom line). Alternatively, one could posit
that value is primarily subjective, albeit socially constructed (e.g., [42]) and that this premise
is primarily evidenced by the behavior of decision makers pursuing nonrational outcomes
(e.g., [20, 46, 47]).
We may argue that a person’s subjective valuation—presumably as a gestalt rather than
as a weighted calculation of elements—weighs a myriad of issues relative to one another as
a system of values, rather than independent of one another as is often the case in formal
models of objective value; in other words, it is an expression of a person’s coherent value

CONTACT Stephen C. Wingreen stephen.wingreen@canterbury.ac.nz Department of Accounting and Information

Systems, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 475

system rather than a collection of independently valued things. It is no surprise that

researchers are reluctant to approach value from this perspective, since it is inherently
difficult to design objective, scientific research that (1) controls for all possible subjective
things a person may consider when making value judgments and (2) operationalizes
theoretical concepts with measurements that account for how a person subjectively values
a myriad of things relative to one another.
If defining and measuring value was difficult in bricks-and-mortar economies, it
becomes an order of magnitude more so in the 21st-century digital economy, even without
the need to weigh the many intangible and highly subjective aspects of a thing’s perceived
value. Some products are made possible only by the existence of the digital economy, and
the value of other products is altered by the digital economy. Not least, the digital economy
puts everyone in more direct contact with others whom they would have had no relation­
ship with otherwise.
Nowhere is the need to understand value more palpable and imminent than in the
case of cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin in particular. Cryptocurrencies are
cryptography-based, decentralized virtual currencies that are independent of central
authority, such as a government. A bewildering array of cryptocurrencies, each spe­
cializing in its own value-niche, are traded on exchanges devoted to them, and trades
may be made both in units of cryptocurrencies and in fiat currencies. This suggests
that traders are actively making value judgments about cryptocurrencies that incorpo­
rate a broad field of criteria besides their dollar value or exchange rate with fiat
currency. Cryptocurrencies are also a topic of widespread interest, judging by the
number of banks and related financial institutions that are developing cryptocurrencies
as a strategic asset [8, 26, 48], but they are also the polarizations that characterize most
debates about cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin is the most prominent and widely traded cryptocurrency. The questions
“Why is Bitcoin valuable?” and “Where does Bitcoin’s value come from?” dominate the
cultural narrative about Bitcoin [42], though answers are generally unsatisfying, and
debatable (e.g., [34]). Recently Bitcoin has been trading around the $9,500 per Bitcoin
level, but the price alone does not indicate the reasons why people value Bitcoin as
they do, or in other words, the sources of Bitcoin’s value. Before questions of this
nature may be answered, we must first generate testable hypotheses, a task that is often
approached by means of abductive logic [25, 33]. For this reason, we choose to focus
our investigation on the sources and drivers of value for Bitcoin as they are repre­
sented by the value system of the Bitcoin community.
Usually, a value system is defined as the collection of beliefs and attitudes that a group
intersubjectively produces or shares among themselves. In our research we define a value
system as a coherent set of beliefs about the importance of things with respect to each other,
and therefore a thing’s value is an emergent property of the synthesis of interrelationships
between the many subjective beliefs held about the thing. In the context of our research we
are concerned with the values and value system held by the Bitcoin community about
Bitcoin. Accordingly, we have the following research question:

Research Question: What is the value system of the Bitcoin community?

476 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

The contributions of this research are (1) the identification of types of value systems for
cryptocurrencies in general, and Bitcoin in particular; (2) the definition, operationalization,
and measurement of value systems in the subjective paradigm; and (3) the use of abductive
reasoning to support research about subjective values and value systems.

Literature Review
The Concept of Value and Value Systems
The centrality of the concept of value in business research is evidenced by its persistence in
the top ranks of journals in the field. Yet “value” is consistently difficult to define and
quantify as the concept is infused with subjectivity and laden with many possible meanings.
Value is a quintessentially “fat” word, a highly elusive and ambiguous concept, like Saint
Augustine’s thoughts about time in his Confessions: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If
I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
One common and straightforward approach is to say that the value of something is
measured by its market price, and so we can use share price as a measure of—and surrogate
for—shareholder value. This effectively aggregates individual or subjective values into an
“objective” value that is easily quantifiable and, since the value is signified by an amount of
money, fungible. Price, in this sense, is the product of a consensus, or a form of vote through
which we can understand the intersubjective judgment of a thing’s relative value. Price is
dynamic: as the collective’s view changes over time, the price dutifully adjusts—an elegant
solution indeed.
However, using the market price to measure value has significant problems, not the least
of which is the subjective nature of value. The notion that the collective has reached
a “consensus” around an asset’s value is contestable, as only a small fraction of the collective
is ever in the market, either buying or selling for any given asset, and in a centralized
market, price setting is a power possessed by few. Thus, it is invidious to assume that the
market price represents the value placed on the asset by the collective. For example, the
price of a loaf of bread might be $2, but an individual’s circumstances—is one rich, poor,
hungry, or allergic to wheat?—determines the value an individual places on the loaf. Value,
like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Moreover, not everyone has access to the market,
and time has value. For instance, if they could, one’s grandchildren might bid for a barrel of
oil on today’s spot market to radically change its price to reflect its future value to them. In
addition, some things are kept away from (legal) markets—such as human organs—and
some things do not have a market, so there is no market price, while there are also moral
and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy [37]. More generally,
relying on the market as the ultimate arbiter of value is to employ a particular ideological
position, which some would argue might result in a dysfunctional society, where things with
high aesthetic value have little or no market value. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we can know
the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Finally, Zelizer [52, 53] presents plenty of
evidence about how different people perceive, value, and spend money differently, decon­
structing the idea that money is fungible, or that it is a single, interchangeable, absolutely
impersonal instrument [3, 29].
An alternative approach is to focus on the plural values, which shifts attention from
a singular concept, such as the asset or share price, to a set of interconnected beliefs held by
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 477

an individual or group. The pertinent question then is around the values that individuals
and groups uphold and endorse in their lives, and how researchers should determine or
make sense of these. This leads us into a substantial literature on how social values should be
defined and measured, and how “values scales” should be designed and used [1, 35, 40].
Synthesising the literature, Schwartz and Bilsky’s [41, p. 51] framework of universal values
proposes that “values are (a) concepts or beliefs, (b) about desirable end states or behaviors,
(c) that transcend specific situations, (d) guide selection or evaluations of behavior and
events, and (e) are ordered by relative importance.”
We depart from the concept of universal values in that our research focuses on a context
where values are volatile, elastic, and ephemeral. Subjective values are not universal, but
self-referential and socially constructed. It is important to make the distinction that,
although these values may appear to be universal or widely held when norms become
institutionalized, many would argue that values are actually self-referential beliefs shared
among many, or a vast majority of people. It is a logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum
to say that something is true (objective) merely because many people say it is so. In other
words, there is no threshold beyond which a sample of subjective beliefs becomes objective
by the inclusion of additional observations, larger samples, more people, or smaller con­
fidence intervals. By way of a counterexample, Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful
Dead, once answered a question about the unusual dedication and quirky tastes of their
fans, saying, “We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like
licorice really like licorice.” A taste for licorice is by no means universal, but it is clearly
valued subjectively by a unique group of people whose uniqueness deserves a little attention.

Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, and Value in the Digital World

Repeatedly over the decades if not centuries, when value systems mismatched with existing
markets and the currencies they were based upon, new currencies were put forward. A few
examples are coexisting currencies in Renaissance Florence [32], alternative currencies
during the Great Depression of the 1930s, local/city currencies such as Brixton or Bristol
pounds, and of course cryptocurrencies. One of the more peculiar and fascinating cases of
value in the digital economy has come in the form of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. As of
July 2020, coinmarketcap.com lists more than 5,000 cryptocurrencies with a combined
market capitalization of $270 billion USD, although more than 80 percent of the market cap
consists of the top five cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (63 percent), Ethereum (11 percent),
Ripple (3 percent), Tether (3 percent), and Bitcoin Cash (2 percent). The cryptocurrency
market is often referred to as an “ecosystem” where every cryptocurrency fills its own niche.
Some function like venture capital instruments, some emphasize socially desirable qualities
like privacy and anonymity, some function as exchanges for other currencies, and others
serve as application development platforms for blockchain applications such as for Fintech.
Needless to say, there is much debate about their future, though it seems likely that
cryptocurrencies will be with us for a while, given the diversity of offerings and depth of
capitalization.
“Why is Bitcoin valuable?” is a question often heard among even the experts, because it is
not clear why Bitcoin should be valued as it is. It is not the legal tender of any nation, nor
does it represent anything of physical or intrinsic value. Some people attribute its value to its
scarcity, others to its anonymity, and others to its immutability, all of which are created and
478 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

managed by a computer algorithm. Current theories either fail to explain Bitcoin’s value, or
it is not immediately apparent how they might explain it. There may be as many beliefs
about Bitcoin’s value as there are people. So once again we ask, Why is Bitcoin valuable?
Early academic research into Bitcoin tended to focus on its then perceived value as an
anonymous payment system that appealed to a niche, but a growing technical community
(e.g., [2, 28]). This can be explained through Bitcoin’s early reputation, still partially present, as
the currency of the dark net, most notably the underground drug bazaar Silk Road [9]. By
2014, after a rally in November 2013 when Bitcoin breached $1,000 per Bitcoin, the literature
began to take a different angle, exploring the quantitative dynamics underlying its extreme
price volatility but without ever coming to any clear and definitive answer [4, 15, 23, 34].
The shift from Bitcoin’s value as associated with its alleged anonymity, no doubt linked
to its prominent role in cybercriminal enterprises, thereby grew to encompass a wider
interest to economists, but interestingly also encouraged those from qualitative back­
grounds to begin research about the social and political origins of Bitcoin within digital
libertarian cultures [12, 21]. This literature points to a valuation that is built around ideals
rather than simply market price, but in effect “points backwards,” in the sense of explaining
the original attraction of Bitcoin to its earliest adopters and leaves the question of Bitcoin’s
current attraction unanswered. As late as 2016 it was relatively uncontroversial to define
Bitcoin users as (1) computer programmers and enthusiasts, (2) financial traders and
speculators, (3) digital libertarians, and (4) criminals [13]. However, today the Bitcoin
community is much wider, even “gentrified” to a certain extent, broadening to include
the blockchain community and emanating out from the traditional business world.
Bitcoin’s technical value lies in its underlying blockchain technology, which solves
a long-standing problem faced by designers of any decentralized digital money, namely,
how to prohibit “double spending” without recourse to a trusted third party [30].
Specifically, in the case of a cryptocurrency, how can anyone be sure that the token has
not been copied, as is trivially easy to do with digital objects? If it can be copied, it is
effectively worthless as a form of money because it has no scarcity, being endlessly
reproducible. This problem is traditionally solved by introducing a central authority, such
as a bank or PayPal, to ensure that nobody spends more than they have. However, a small
group of digital libertarians, known as the cypherpunks, argued that this meant all financial
transactions could be tracked by these central authorities, and in response they set about
creating a decentralized digital currency to ensure online financial privacy [22]. This system
allows Bitcoin to decouple itself from the traditional ways in which currencies attain value—
for instance, being backed by hard metals (such as gold or silver), or by a central bank (or
any bank), or by the state (fiat money)—and highlights how the sources of Bitcoin’s value
lay more in how the technology offers the promise of privacy [5, 24].
All of the preceding considerations make Bitcoin a relevant and current context within
which to explore the subjective nature of value and value systems in cryptocurrencies.
People clearly value Bitcoin for a number of reasons beyond its simple market value. There
appear to be social, cultural, and technological elements of Bitcoin’s value that are assumed
to be aggregated into its market price, but the particulars of these nonfinancial values are
poorly understood among both academics and practitioners; these are the primary motiva­
tions for this study. We could also ask the question, “Is Bitcoin like licorice?”
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 479

Methodology
We operationalize a person’s value system according to the principles of concourse theory
and its associated Q-methodology, which specifies the Q-sort as the means of measurement.
Q-methodology was developed for research contexts where people’s subjective beliefs are of
interest, and where there is a need to understand unstructured or unknown domains of
knowledge, which makes it an ideal choice for our research question, goals, and objectives.
In the context of value systems, a Q-sort represents the synthesis of interrelationships
between subjectively valued things—in our case, the domain of Bitcoin and cryptocur­
rency—because every item in a Q-sort is sorted with reference to the subjective value of
every other. In this manner, people operationalize their own value system about Bitcoin by
prioritizing the value of their beliefs about it relative to one another.
Research of this nature is inherently driven by the questions about the phenomenon and
is less concerned with testing hypotheses drawn from extant theory; in other words,
questions about specific observations must be answered before more general theory may
be developed. Abductive reasoning asks what kind of theory or hypotheses might explain
a phenomenon [16, 17, 33], and therefore we adopt an abductive approach to our investiga­
tion, since it will support the development of an initial theory based on specific observations
about cryptocurrencies in general, and Bitcoin in particular.

Procedure
Q-methodology is now well known and has been used across many different fields. The
approach has also become standardized in many respects, as typified by McKeown and
Thomas’s [27] six-step sequence, Brown [6], or Watts and Stenner [51].
In the first step, the researchers identify the concourse, which is the universe of interest or
area of discourse they wish to explore. In our case, this is the value system(s) of the Bitcoin
community. Concourse refers to the volume of discussion about a topic, which includes
well-informed beliefs, but also gossip and rumor: “our thoughts, feelings, wishes, emotions
and beliefs, our fantasies, dreams—in a word, our ‘mind’” [45, p. 22]. The concourse is the
unit of analysis in a Q-method study, which means generalizations are made about the
concourse rather than the people providing the Q-sorts, and the primary goal is to under­
stand its structure.
In the second step, a representative sample of the concourse is taken for much the same
reasons as samples of a population are taken when the goal is to understand population
characteristics. Because of the inherent difficulty in sampling an infinite concourse, various
techniques are employed to produce a sample—known as the Q-set—of manageable size, as
comprehensive and representative as possible. The authors of this paper, all of whom are
members of an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the study of cryptocurrencies
and blockchain applications, hosted by a preeminent business school, over the course of
about three weeks developed and discussed among themselves a representative sample of
Q-statements about the sources of Bitcoin’s value to form the Q-set. Content of the
Q-statements was drawn primarily from the academic literature, which at the time was
scarce; practitioner literature, including blogs and web pages dedicated to cryptocurrencies
and Bitcoin; and the researchers’ own interpersonal interactions with members of the
Bitcoin community. One of the authors maintained dialogue with an extensive network
480 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

of professional contacts so as to include aspects of the concourse that were important to the
community of practitioners. A diverse and eclectic body of theories were considered to
represent the concourse, and statements were generated to represent their core concepts
and constructs—for example, technology trust, technology use and adoption, technology
and information privacy, socio-anthropological, and monetary and economic theories were
considered. In summary, to the greatest extent possible an interdisciplinary effort was made
to draw the Q-set from all areas of business, culture, and society that manifested interac­
tions with the concourse of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
A workshop was convened with eight members of the research group, including the
authors, to further refine the initial instrumentation. A balance was sought between (1)
maximum diversity of content in the Q-set by accepting individual contributions from the
participants in the developmental procedure and (2) consensus by subjecting the resulting
Q-set to group discussion and examination in the workshop. The rules for inclusion and
exclusion applied a general rule of thumb that the theoretical constructs and concepts of
interest should be adequately represented with minimal duplication or overlap of content,
though this part of the procedure was not rigidly structured.
After three iterations of review, discussion, and revision, the researchers judged that the
set of 25 Q-statements was ready to be pilot-tested. Members of the research group other
than the authors pilot-tested the Q-set with the goal of ensuring that the instructions for
administering the Q-sorts were clear, the statements were understandable, and the proce­
dure would function as intended. This phase concluded when there was consensus among
the researchers that the Q-set adequately represented the concourse of interest with the
greatest efficiency and economy of ideas, words, and statements in the Q-set.
The third step in the methodology involves selecting the P-set, the people who are likely
to possess theoretically significant perspectives about the concourse. To achieve this, we
convened a half-day conference in April 2016 to discuss Bitcoin in a major business hub for
European markets with a vibrant cryptocurrency community. Invitations were sent to
a wide range of individuals whom we identified as being interested in Bitcoin. We invited
members of a local cryptocurrency interest group, developers, lawyers, corporate executives,
regulators, consultants, and academics. Thirty-one people attended the conference, includ­
ing individuals from the various sectors targeted.
In the fourth step, members of the P-set model their viewpoints by completing a Q-sort,
which in our case is the operational expression of the person’s Bitcoin value system. The
Q-statements were printed on cards, and each participant sorted the Q-statements into the
distribution illustrated in Figure 1. The somewhat rounded kurtosis of our distribution reflects
the nascent level of knowledge and understanding about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies among
those participating in the Q-sort at the time the study was conducted [49]. The exercise took
approximately 30 minutes to complete and resulted in 27 usable Q-sorts and an 87 percent
response rate.

Figure 1. Q-Sort Distribution.

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 481

Because it was impractical to conduct post-Q-sort interviews during the conference, we

asked the participants to complete a short questionnaire (see Appendix) that included
simple questions about their level of knowledge about Bitcoin, experience with Bitcoin as
a user, experience with Bitcoin as a developer, ownership of Bitcoin, knowledge about
money systems, risk tolerance–risk aversion, and basic demographic characteristics.
Participants were also asked to indicate their interest in legal, technical, ethical, fintech,
government, or applications issues about Bitcoin. Although these kinds of additional data
are neither required by Q-methodology nor sufficient for factor interpretation, they may be
used to supplement a factor interpretation [6, 7, 51]. For example, Brown [7] performs an
analysis of variance to distinguish between the “technical” and “methodological” elements
of his Q-set while highlighting the analysis of variance’s weaknesses with regard to factor
interpretation. In the same manner, we examine our findings to determine whether any of
these variables might be relevant to factor interpretation. These variables are analyzed
qualitatively because our interests are to discover new facts about the people involved in
our study [43, 44]. In our analysis, we report how the exemplars for each factor responded
to our follow-up survey, paying close attention to unusual response patterns (e.g., “no
exemplars of this type reported knowledge of . . . ”).

Factor Analysis and Results

The Q-sorts are analyzed in the fifth step of the methodology.1 Factors, also known as
“types,” represent the “average” Q-sort for the people who represent each factor. The types
are defined primarily by the Q-statements with the highest positive priorities, but some­
times the negative priorities are also important.
A centroid factor analysis with varimax rotation resulted in a five-factor solution, which
we then explored with a series of judgmental rotations, because the “simple structure” of
a varimax solution is only one of an infinity of solutions that all have equal validity. Four-,
five-, and six-factor solutions were examined, but a five-factor solution was preferred
because it explained 5 percent more variance than the four-factor solution, and the sixth
factor was highly correlated with one of the first five factors. Additionally, the five-factor
solution is in agreement with the eigenvalue-greater-than-1 criterion often used for select­
ing factor solutions [51]. The eigenvalues of the unrotated factor matrix were 5.0, 2.4, 1.6,
1.1, and 1.3 for factors 1 to 5, respectively.
There were eight Q-sorts that did not load on any factor, which we removed from our
data [51]. We reanalyzed the data with the goal of reproducing the factor structure observed
in our first analysis, once again using varimax rotation explored with a series of minor
judgmental rotations. The resulting five-factor solution reproduces our initial analysis with
only minor differences in the factor array, as would be expected, with no less than three
Q-sorts per factor, and explains 61 percent of the variance in the data.
Abductive reasoning—in particular, existential abduction—is the underlying logic of explora­
tory factor analysis, which generates hypotheses about previously unknown objects or properties
that, if true, would explain an observation as a matter of course [16, 17]. Therefore, the factor
score matrix is the object of analysis because it is the observation to be explained at the focal
point of existential abduction. Table 1 reports the factor scores for the five-factor solution, sorted
by consensus versus disagreement, and Table 2 reports the factor loadings. The highest-
consensus statements are at the top of Table 1, and the statements with highest disagreement
482 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

Table 1. Q-Factor Analysis, with Q-Sort Statements Sorted by Consensus versus Disagreement.
Type 1 Type 2 Type 3 Type 4 Type 5
22. Using Bitcoin to create new markets. 2 1 0 1 0
23. Using Bitcoin to disrupt existing markets. 1 1 0 0 −1
15. Bitcoin being used as a “niche” currency. 0 −2 −2 −2 −2
18. Bitcoin being adopted as a reserve currency. −2 −1 −1 0 −1
1. Enabling private trading using Bitcoin. 0 0 1 −2 −1
24. Maintaining laissez-faire as the best policy. 0 −1 −1 1 −1
3. Making the Bitcoin technology more secure. 1 1 1 2 3
14. Making Bitcoin’s technology easier to use. 1 0 1 2 3
12. Undermining the power of the state. −2 0 −2 −1 −3
17. Making the Bitcoin price less volatile. 0 0 0 −1 2
16. Promoting Bitcoin to reduce the cost of financial transactions. 3 −1 0 2 1
8. Ensuring the Bitcoin system is always highly decentralized. 1 2 3 −1 1
25. Eliminating the need for a third party in transactions. 2 −1 2 0 2
6. Allowing the Bitcoin technology to be controlled by large −1 −3 −3 0 −3
corporations.
10. Making the Bitcoin technology easier to scale. 2 1 2 1 −1
2. Addressing the gender imbalance in the Bitcoin community. 0 1 −2 −3 1
19. Preserving Bitcoin traders’ anonymity. −1 2 −3 1 1
5. Making the Bitcoin technology more efficient. −1 2 1 −2 2
4. Allowing the state to regulate Bitcoin. −2 −3 1 −3 0
9. Addressing the environmental concerns about the amount of energy −3 −1 3 −1 0
the Bitcoin technology consumes.
7. Undermining big corporations. −1 3 −1 1 −2
20. Promoting the Bitcoin technology (blockchain) and forgetting about 3 −2 2 −1 −1
Bitcoin.
11. Creating new forms of community around Bitcoin. 1 0 −1 3 −2
21. Creating a more equal world. −3 3 0 0 1
13. Enabling the core development team to regulate the technology. −1 −2 −1 3 0

Table 2. Factor Loadings of Q-Sorts.

QSORT 1 2 3 4 5
001 0.76 0.19 0.27 0.37 −0.06
008 0.82 −0.29 0.34 −0.01 −0.05
014 0.63 −0.21 0.13 0.13 0.19
024 0.50 0.01 0.27 0.32 0.24
005 −0.11 0.54 0.39 −0.11 0.16
009 0.28 0.62 0.11 0.19 −0.17
018 −0.10 0.85 0.15 −0.24 0.13
011 0.27 0.42 0.63 −0.07 −0.03
012 −0.01 −0.01 0.71 0.04 0.13
016 0.37 −0.17 0.60 −0.41 0.10
023 0.22 0.15 0.51 0.21 0.35
026 −0.05 −0.18 0.80 0.26 0.02
027 −0.09 0.45 0.57 0.05 0.02
004 −0.08 −0.21 0.12 0.40 −0.06
010 0.01 0.07 0.46 −0.49 −0.09
021 0.30 0.35 0.31 0.56 0.08
007 0.03 0.16 0.43 0.12 0.81
020 −0.06 −0.09 −0.04 −0.12 0.61
022 0.35 −0.02 0.33 0.23 0.54
% expl.var. 13 12 19 8 9
Note: The PQMethod software identifies “exemplar” factor loadings if (1) the factor explains more than half of the common
variance (a2 > h2/2), and (2) the factor loading is significant at α < 0.05 (a > 1.96/SQRT(nitems)).

are at the bottom of the table. The statements with the highest consensus may be interpreted as
meaning that these values are held in common by members of the Bitcoin community, and the
statements with highest disagreement represent competing values that define their differences.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 483

Factor types are defined according to the factor score associated with the most positively and
negatively ranked statements. Factors 4 and 5 explain 8 percent and 9 percent of the data,
respectively, with three exemplars each, and should therefore be approached cautiously until
they are confirmed and refined by subsequent research.

Type 1: Fintech
The Type 1 value system represents a perspective focused on the technology underpinning
Bitcoin—the blockchain—and its potential and disruptive impact on the financial services
sector. Where Bitcoin is concerned, the emphasis is on strictly financial issues, specifically
transaction fees, with political or ideological concerns absent. This is well illustrated by the
prioritization of the following statements (in order of ranking, with statement numbers and
factor scores):

16 Promoting Bitcoin to reduce the cost of financial transactions (3)

20 Promoting the Bitcoin technology (Blockchain) and forgetting about Bitcoin (3)
25 Eliminating the need for a third party in transactions (2)
10 Making the Bitcoin technology easier to scale (2)
Additionally, statements 16, 20, 9, and 21 were distinguishing statements for this factor,
which means that these statements are unique to the Type 1 value system. The Type
1 perspective is characterized by a negative prioritization of some idealistic issues related
to Bitcoin (most negative rankings last):
18 Bitcoin being adopted as a reserve currency (−2)
12 Undermining the power of the State (−2)
9 Addressing the environmental concerns about the amount of energy the Bitcoin
technology consumes (−3)
21 Creating a more equal world (−3)
Two of the four exemplars reported an interest in Fintech on our follow-up survey, no Type
1 exemplar reported having a high level of knowledge about Bitcoin, and three of the four
exemplars reported a minimal “knowledge about monetary systems.”
The Type 1 perspective advocates not so much for Bitcoin itself as for the underlying
technology of Bitcoin, known as the blockchain. This perspective is almost totally disin­
terested in the political and social side of Bitcoin but maintains an interest in its function­
ality as a means to reduce transaction costs. Broadly speaking, Type 1 is characterized by
how the blockchain may be used in more traditional commercial enterprises and how it
might be applied beyond the use-case of money. A person with this perspective is more
likely to have traditionalist politics rather than the radical libertarian views espoused by
many Bitcoin advocates. Accordingly, we label this type the “Fintech” perspective, as it
seems to most accurately capture the essence of Type 1.
It is also possible that this type represents the perspective of banks and large financial
institutions that are developing cryptocurrencies as a class of strategic asset, although this
theory is less likely on account of the nonprioritization of any statement about the financial
value of Bitcoin and the negative association with “knowledge of money.” A person with
484 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

this perspective might develop a cryptocurrency as a strategic infrastructural asset rather

than as a financial asset, perhaps as a means to manage certain kinds of transactions.

Type 2: Libertarian
We labeled the Type 2 value system as “Libertarian” because it is characterized by the
prioritization of statements that emphasize the themes of decentralization and political
activism. Libertarian politics originating in the cypherpunk community have been prevalent
within Bitcoin culture since its inception and have remained an important driving force
through its history [11, 21]. The Libertarian perspective constitutes the political core of
Bitcoin, with the emphasis on decentralist thinking (i.e., no central authority):
21 Creating a more equal world (3)
7 Undermining big corporations (3)
8 Ensuring the Bitcoin system is always highly decentralized (2)
5 Making the Bitcoin technology more efficient (2)
The Type 2 perspective is also characterized by a strong negative prioritization of the
following statements, consistent with what one would expect of the antiregulation, anti­
statist thinking of libertarian politics:

20 Promoting the Bitcoin technology (Blockchain) and forgetting about Bitcoin (−2)
13 Enabling the core development team to regulate the technology (−2)
4 Allowing the state to regulate Bitcoin (−3)
6 Allowing the Bitcoin technology to be controlled by large corporations (−3)

Statements 21, 7, 20, and 13 are distinguishing statements that are unique to the Type 2
value system. Two of the three exemplars of the Libertarian perspective reported a high level
of knowledge about Bitcoin on our follow-up survey, two reported a high level of knowledge
about monetary systems, and two reported high levels of risk-tolerance.

Type 3: Purist
People with a Type 3 value system espouse beliefs that are in agreement with the traditional
open-source values of Bitcoin, as it is expressed in the many debates and exchanges between
members of the Bitcoin community about how to develop and position Bitcoin for the
future. The Type 3 perspective is characterized by primarily technical concerns:
8 Ensuring the Bitcoin system is always highly decentralized (3)
9 Addressing the environmental concerns about the amount of energy Bitcoin technol­
ogy consumes (3)
25 Eliminating the need for a third party in transaction (2)
10 Making Bitcoin’s technology easier to scale (2)

Statements 9 and 19 are distinguishing statements unique to the Type 3 value system. Type
3 is also characterized by highly negative priorities that are likely seen within this value
system as incidental to the overall technical project:
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 485

12 Undermining the power of the state (−2)

2 Addressing the gender imbalance in the Bitcoin community (−2)
19 Preserving Bitcoin traders’ anonymity (−3)
6 Allowing the Bitcoin technology to be controlled by large corporations (−3)
None of the six exemplars of Type 3 reported any actual experience with Bitcoin as a user,
and none reported high levels of knowledge about monetary systems.
Overall, we are characterizing this type as “purist” in that the focus is on the technology
and improving its functionality and efficiency. The archetype is that of a technocratic
ideologue who is less interested (but not completely disinterested) in the political ideologies
espoused by the Libertarians (Type 2). Purists may be construed as technologists who are
engaged in a “communal” project of building secure anonymous digital money without
attaching overtly political ideals to it.

Type 4: “Average Joe”

In the lexicon of Q-methodology, Type 4 is what is termed a “bipolar factor,” which
warrants explanation. Mathematically, a factor is an axis that passes through the dataset,
and we compute factor loadings for each person (or variable in classical factor analysis) by
determining the Pythagorean distance of their projections upon the axis. If all such
projections cluster at either the positive or negative end of the axis, then the factor is
mono-polar, but if there are representatives at both ends—as occurs in Type 4—then the
factor is bipolar, meaning that people at opposite poles have beliefs that are diametrically
opposed. Bipolar factors are common in Q-methodology and mean that opposing view­
points are instantiated within the concourse. So, for instance, we might find one factor
representing a belief in centralization, but if the factor is bipolar, then some individuals
are strongly opposed to centralization and others are strongly supportive. In this case,
however, we are not finding a factor that appears to map onto a coherent set of beliefs. We
see this when we consider the four prioritized statements at the top (positive) end of the
spectrum:

13 Enabling the core development team to regulate the technology (3)

11 Creating new forms of community around Bitcoin (3)
3 Making the Bitcoin technology more secure (2)
14 Making Bitcoin’s technology easier to use (2)
These statements appear to be a rather arbitrary set and certainly do not constitute
a coherent belief system. In particular, Statements 3 and 14—and possibly also 13—seem
to contradict each other at one (top) pole of the factor. Neither do the statements at the
other (bottom) end of the spectrum cohere in any meaningful way:
15 Bitcoin being used as a “niche” currency (−2)
5 Making the Bitcoin technology more efficient (−2)
2 Addressing the gender imbalance in the Bitcoin community (−3)
4 Allowing the state to regulate Bitcoin (−3)
486 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

At this pole of the factor, Statements 5 and 4 seem to contradict each other. Also of interest,
one pole of the type values “Enabling the core development team to regulate the technology”
while the other pole values “Allowing the state to regulate Bitcoin.” Statements 13, 11, and 5
are distinguishing statements for Type 4, but that doesn’t help make much sense of this
factor. Two of the three Type 4 exemplars reported high levels of knowledge about Bitcoin
and knowledge of monetary systems.
Although these rather ambiguous results might make one suspicious of the analysis and
methodology, it is consistent with ethnographic studies of the Bitcoin community, where we
sometimes encounter a cacophony of seemingly contradictory, capricious, and confused
opinions. The perspective is closer to that of a hobbyist who knows only bits and pieces but
is not exactly confused so much as she does not spend too much time thinking about the
wider implications of Bitcoin—in other words, “Average Joes” who have only a passing
interest in Bitcoin.
The prioritization of Statements 16 (reducing transaction cost), 14 (easier to use), and 11
(new forms of community) at the positive pole of this factor resembles a type observed
recently in unpublished research that prioritized the Nano cryptocurrency as an economical
payment method, lack of time to learn how to use Nano, and the importance of recom­
mendations by friends and relatives. The same study reported another factor that resembles
the negative priorities of Statements 1 (enable private trading) and 15 (Bitcoin as a niche
currency) by its prioritization of using Nano to pay for goods and services, developing new
payment methods for clients, and cultivating new clients by offering Nano services [36]. The
participants in that research were language translators who were not necessarily crypto­
currency enthusiasts as we have in our study, and many of them may well have been like our
Average Joes.

Type 5: Gentrifier
The Type 5 value system is characterized by the prioritization of these statements:
3 Making the Bitcoin technology more secure (3)
14 Making Bitcoin’s technology easier to use (3)
17 Making the Bitcoin price less volatile (2)
25 Eliminating the need for a third party in transactions (2)
5 Making the Bitcoin technology more efficient (2)
People who espouse the Type 5 value system negatively prioritize these statements:
7 Undermining big corporations (−2)
15 Bitcoin being used as a “niche” currency (−3)
11 Creating new forms of community around Bitcoin (−2)
6 Allowing the Bitcoin technology to be controlled by large corporations (−3)
12 Undermining the power of the state (−3)
The prioritization of Statements 17 and 11 is unique to the Type 5 perspective. No
exemplars of the Type 5 value system reported either experience with or ownership of
Bitcoin. Two of the three exemplars were risk averse, and two of the three reported minimal
knowledge of monetary systems. The Gentrifier’s risk aversion, lack of knowledge about
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 487

monetary systems, and prioritization of Statements 3 (more security) and 14 (easier to use)
bear some similarity with a type observed in recent unpublished research, which believed
the Nano cryptocurrency was too risky and that they would need more “financial invest­
ment knowledge” before accepting Nano [36].
Overall, this type seems concerned with making Bitcoin clean, acceptable, and legitimate,
and so we label this type as “Gentrifiers.” The gentrification of Bitcoin is typically concerned
with how to disassociate Bitcoin from its reputation as the currency of dark net cybercrim­
inals while making it more “mainstream.” In this sense, Bitcoin is akin to a working-class
neighborhood that over time has its complexion altered, or “cleaned up,” by new middle-
class residents who desire to “feel at home,” perhaps by means of a better user-experience
and better regulation and oversight.

Discussion and Interpretation

Our research has been guided by the research question “What is the value system of the
Bitcoin community?” We identified five types, each of which is characterized by a peculiar
value system in relation to Bitcoin: Fintech, Libertarian, Purist, Average Joe, and Gentrifier.
In this section we interpret each of the five factors identified by the factor analysis, which is
the sixth and most important step in a Q-method study, and provide a brief discussion
about how abductive logic was applied to the interpretation. In a philosophical sense, it is
arguable that the factors have meaning only because they are interpreted, and in the
subjective paradigm there is no “correct” perspective from which to interpret the factor.
Because a Q-set is a representative sample that allows generalizations to be made about the
concourse, our findings and their interpretation may be generalizable to cryptocurrencies
beyond Bitcoin, as suggested with regard to the Nano cryptocurrency in the previous
section, though additional research may be required to confirm this.

Abductive Reasoning and the Interpretation of Factor Types

If we observe a half-eaten donut in an otherwise full box of Krispy Kremes lying on my
kitchen counter, then we might theorize that my spouse ate only half of it because she’s
watching what she eats, but my son would have eaten half the box, so it must not have been
him. If the box is on the table in the faculty lounge on Friday morning, we might theorize
that there is about to be a coffee break but someone sneaked in early and couldn’t resist
taking a bite. If the box is on the table following a Weight Watchers meeting, we might
theorize that either everyone is enjoying a successful weight loss program or nobody dared
indulge themselves in the view of their weight-watching peers.
As such, abduction is a form of subjective reasoning for things that may be intuitively
true but capable of neither proof nor disproof objectively by experimental or observational
methods. The theory that my spouse ate half a donut because she’s watching what she eats is
neither a logical consequence of nor capable of proof or disproof from the observation of
a half-eaten donut on my countertop alone by itself. There is no evidence of intention in
a half-eaten donut any more than intention is evident in a half-drunk glass of water; a DNA
test may confirm that she took the bite but will not establish her intention, nor would we
have a “scientific” reason to theorize that in the first place. The theory is, however, testable
as a subjective hypothesis.
488 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

Endless possibilities could have preceded the observation of a half-eaten donut, however, so
how do we determine which of those are the most likely explanations? There are different
philosophical positions about how abductive reasoning should proceed [25], which are largely
dependent on the extent to which the research seeks to validate an a priori theory. Haig [16, 17]
describes an abductive approach to theory construction that comprises theory generation,
theory development, and theory appraisal. According to Haig, existential abduction generates
hypotheses about previously unknown objects or properties, and analogical abduction derives
new hypotheses from previously existing hypotheses; existential and analogical abduction play
a role in both theory generation and theory development. Our abductive exploration is nearest
to Haig’s because there was little previous research to rely on for a priori theoretical perspectives
about why people value Bitcoin. We begin by cautiously exploring the possibilities presented by
the gray literature and conventional wisdom while remaining open to unconventional alter­
native explanations as we move between theory generation, development, and appraisal.
In the months that followed the data analysis, (1) the results of the analysis were received
and reviewed by all coauthors; (2) the coauthors individually shared their thoughts about
the meaning of the factor types by means of one-on-one conversations and informal
discussions; (3) the coauthors convened a workshop open to the entire research group,
other interested faculty, and graduate students to further refine the factor types; and (4) the
coauthors held a videoconference and shared multiple rounds of email discussions as the
paper was being written. With regard to our definition of value systems, Q-methodology is
capable of revealing the coherence of beliefs and the synthesis of their interrelationships that
define the value system. The theories we derive in this section about the Bitcoin commu­
nity’s value system may be testable in either the subjective paradigm with subsequent
Q-method research or the objective paradigm by classical, hypothetico-deductive theory
testing methods. Since each type is its own internally consistent theory about Bitcoin value,
the statements with the highest (and lowest) scores could be used to operationalize a theory
of Bitcoin value, as they are most representative of any given type. For example, the Fintech
perspective could be represented positively by Statements 16, 20, 25, and 10 and negatively
by Statements 21, 9, 12, and 18. Distinguishing statements would be useful for testing
differences between two different types with competing values. We also pose other testable
hypotheses that could be tested as subjective hypotheses in follow-up Q-method studies—
for example, comparing perspectives on the meaning of money, or the true reasons for
eating only half a donut. We believe the threat to interpretation posed by researcher bias
was minimized by the multidisciplinary nature of the research group, as well as the length,
depth, and breadth of our discussions.

Riddle Me This: When Is Money not Money?

Money is as difficult to define as value and for much the same reasons, since ideally it is the
medium for the exchange of value. If that is true, then currency is a token or representation
of money, as it is used as a substitute for money, and value may be exchanged without the
use of currency. In other words, currency is an instrument of debt by the issuer (most often
a government) who promises to provide value in exchange for something else of value, such
as goods or services. When currency changes hands, there is the implicit trust that whoever
is using the currency earned it by creating some kind of value and is now exchanging value-
for-value using the currency as a substitute.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 489

For example, a company that makes donuts might find it difficult to allow their
customers to exchange things of real value for donuts. One customer might offer to
exchange a new improved POS terminal, another to resupply the paper napkins, another
to wash the dishes and empty the trash, and for each transaction the donut company must
agree to provide a certain number of donuts in exchange. What if a new POS terminal is
worth 1,000 donuts but the customer wants only two donuts? Either the donut company
waits for a customer who wants 1,000 donuts or agrees to give the customer two donuts as
requested, along with a piece of paper or some other kind of token that entitles the bearer to
998 more donuts. That piece of paper ostensibly is valued at 998 donuts . . . as long as the
donut company is able to make donuts. The 998-donut paper is now a form of currency. If it
became known that the donut company had issued paper for 10 billion donuts but had the
capacity to make that many donuts only if they had 100 years to do so, it would likely cause
a run on real donuts that devalued the paper donuts, as angry and disgruntled customers
attempt to exchange their 998-donut paper for however many donuts the donut company
could provide in exchange. This is no mere thought experiment: it is also an accurate
description of what is currently happening in Venezuela as a result of their collapsing
currency, as Fabiola Zerpa [54] wrote for Bloomberg: “A barber in the countryside cuts hair
for yuccas, bananas or eggs. Moto-taxi drivers will get you where you need to go for carton
of cigarettes. The owners of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants offer a plate of burritos,
enchiladas, tamal and tacos in return for a few packages of paper napkins.” Furthermore,
Venezuelans are using Bitcoin instead of the official currency (the Bolivar), and the
Venezuelan government is attempting to implement its own cryptocurrency (the Petro)
as a substitute for the dying Bolivar [50].
Is Bitcoin money or currency? Or is it something else altogether? One thing is clear from
the analysis of the Q-sorts: with the exception of the bipolar Average Joe type where one
pole valued the development of Bitcoin as a niche currency, none of the other four types
identified in this study valued Bitcoin for reasons related to its monetary or market value,
although there were several Q-statements that gave the participants the opportunity to do
so, such as developing Bitcoin as a reserve currency or making the Bitcoin price less volatile.
Given the volatile fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin, both before and after the data were
collected in April 2016, it is not clear whether this finding would be any different if the data
were collected today. This finding is made even more interesting by the fact that 31 percent
(5 of 16, with 3 not reporting) of the people in this study report owning Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s value appears to be more connected to its potential for social, technical, and
business-related outcomes. For instance, the Fintech perspective believes that Bitcoin’s
value lies in its economic potential for reducing transaction costs, economy of scale, and
eliminating centralized authority of the monetary system. Perhaps the Fintechs are
acknowledging the monetary value of time by their focus on using Bitcoin to free up time
currently taken by less efficient processes? If our fictional donut company had a faster and
more efficient way to make donuts, it might be able to preserve the value of its paper-donut-
currency by using the time saved to make more donuts. The Libertarians believe that
Bitcoin’s value is related to its ability to create a more equal society, apparently by working
to ensure the decentralization of the Bitcoin system and disrupting existing markets, all of
which may be accomplished by keeping Bitcoin out of the hands of the government and
large corporations. It would seem that, to a Libertarian, freedom from the rule of govern­
ments and large corporations is a valuable thing that is embodied by Bitcoin’s potential
490 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

applications to decentralize the monetary system and disrupting the [“rigged”?] existing
markets. The Purists share with both Libertarians and Fintechs the values of decentraliza­
tion and their aversion to allowing either the state or large corporations to control Bitcoin.
However, the Purists distinguish themselves from Fintechs and Libertarians by their
environmental concerns and their desire to make Bitcoin easier to use, perhaps to make it
more accessible to the masses or to achieve a “critical mass” in the markets. One possible
theory that might explain the Purists is that they believe Bitcoin could be instrumental in the
creation of a stable, sustainable market where value is exchanged more reliably.
“Knowledge about monetary systems” was negatively associated with the Fintech and
Purist perspectives, and positively associated with the Libertarian perspective, despite the
seemingly paradoxical finding that none of these groups prioritized anything that was
directly related to Bitcoin’s market value. Curiously, the Libertarians were the only type
that reported a high level of knowledge about Bitcoin, which may indicate that they see its
value in nonmonetary terms. The Fintech, Libertarian, and Purist perspectives all seem to
have in common a desire to decentralize monetary authority by keeping Bitcoin’s future
away from the control of the state and large corporations, perhaps with the intent to develop
it as a form of money. On this point, it is worth noting that Hayek, who advocated for
private currencies in competition, believed that “the argument for liberty is not an argument
against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ,
but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use
of coercion to prevent others from doing better” [18, pp. 88–89]. This implies that even if
his and the Libertarians’ value systems differ, they at least converge on how to organize
money. We may summarize that, if Bitcoin is money, then its value for these three types is
clearly not related to its market value; in other words, it is money that is not “money.” This
theory, which is potentially testable in either the subjective or objective paradigms, implies
that some people value Bitcoin because they have an unconventional understanding or
definition of “money.”

Risk and Value

Things of value are most often associated with a level of risk that reflects their value, and
money is both a means of incentivizing risk-taking [10, 14] and transferring property
rights for things of value [19]. If that is true, then risk, value, and money may be seen as
complementary aspects of the same thing. For instance, if something is risk free, then
there is a 100 percent chance of success in obtaining or achieving it, which means that
anyone could do it successfully for themselves, and there is no need for an exchange of
value. In that sense, an exchange of value represents an exchange of risk as well—
customers might be able to make donuts for themselves, but they might also fail or find
it too costly and inefficient, or time-consuming, so buying donuts from a donut shop that
has already assumed and mitigated the risks associated with donut-making is valuable.
Either things are valuable because they embody the successful mitigation of or manage­
ment of risk, or risk and value are complementary aspects of the same thing, like heads
and tails of the same coin. Both hypotheses are testable subjectively. If either is true, then
we would expect people’s beliefs about risk to be reflected in their values and value
systems about cryptocurrency. We therefore inquired about people’s risk tolerance—risk
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 491

aversion as mentioned previously to assist our interpretation of the perspectives being

expressed in the factor types.
The exemplars of the Libertarian value system were more risk tolerant, whereas the
exemplars of the Gentrifier value system were more risk averse. Not surprisingly the
appetite for risk among them seems to closely shadow their knowledge of monetary systems.
It seems that whether or not people are aware of it, the values they express for Bitcoin, risk,
and money follow each other. These data would support the theory that people value things
according to their attitude toward risk and how the thing of value embodies risk, which in
the context of our research would imply that Bitcoin is valued for its ability to mitigate risk
in certain kinds of transactions.
The Libertarians’ risk tolerance may be a reflection of their philosophical beliefs about
the value of freedom and equality. Freedom is risky, since it requires people to be respon­
sible for their own outcomes, whether it is success or failure; only risk-tolerant people are
likely to desire more freedom under such circumstances. The Libertarian value system is the
only one to prioritize “creating a more equal world,” which is one of the most fundamental
assumptions of free market theory, as it is often expressed by the caveat in economic models
that “all other things being equal.” It may be that freedom is money in the Libertarian value
system, because freedom embodies both risk and value.
The Gentrifiers’ value system prioritizes “making Bitcoin’s technology easier to use” and
“making the Bitcoin technology more secure” and negatively values “Bitcoin being used as
a niche currency,” all of which seem consistent with a theory of risk aversion. Safe, secure,
easy-to-use, reliable technology is by definition a technology that has removed risk from the
user, which is consistent with the theory that exchanges of value are also exchanges of risk.
Philosophically speaking, freedom and security are often seen as mutually exclusive, in that
people must give up a little freedom if they want someone or something else to assure their
safety and security. Benjamin Franklin exemplified the Libertarian pole of the philosophical
spectrum when he said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Others disagreed with Franklin;
whereas freedom may be money for the Libertarian, safety and security may be money
for the Gentrifier. Surprisingly, it appears that some people value Bitcoin for its potential to
ensure economic freedoms and others for its potential to provide safety, security, and
reliability in exchanges of value; both theories are testable.

Culture-Money: Is Bitcoin the Language of Business, Society, and Culture?

The relationship between technology, culture, and society is a topic of much interest in both
academic and popular circles. Does technology drive culture, or does culture drive technol­
ogy? Or are technology and culture entwined to such an extent that it serves no useful
purpose to speak of one without the other? The sociomaterialists believe that there is no
social that is not material and no material that is not also social [31], while Shiller [42]
proposes that cultural narratives underlie economic trends, both of which would seem to
agree with the latter notion of technology, society, and culture. There is also a third option:
perhaps technologies emerge as complementary material artifacts from the transitory and
ephemeral soup of culture? For example, the discovery of ancient Sumer revealed that the
oldest written records of culture consisted almost entirely of records of commercial and
economic activity: invoices, inventories, customer service records, tax bills, and various
492 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

other records of money, value, and exchanges of value. The most likely explanation is that
written language emerged as a necessity from the soup of Sumerian culture for the purpose
of accounting for money, value, and exchanges of value [38, 39]! Will archaeologists 5,000
years in the future draw similar conclusions about Bitcoin?
If we were to learn only one thing about the values people expressed for Bitcoin in this study,
it would be that the market value of Bitcoin or its potential as a form of currency is not one of
them. However, business, cultural, and social values were high priorities (positive rankings) to
varying degrees in all five types of value systems identified in the data. Libertarians value Bitcoin
as a cultural and social force to “create a more equal world,” a belief that is apparently unaffected
by Bitcoin’s current status as one of the most unequally concentrated currencies. Fintechs want
to leverage Bitcoin to create efficiencies of scale and lower the cost of financial transactions.
Puritans also value Bitcoin primarily as a force to streamline business transactions but want to
do so in an environmentally sustainable way. Average Joes value the potential of Bitcoin to
create new forms of community. Gentrifiers value the development of Bitcoin as a secure, more
efficient, easy-to-use technology for the masses, and apparently as a consequence are concerned
about gender imbalance in the Bitcoin community. In this context, a likely explanation for
Bitcoin is as a form of “culture-money,” which emerges from the soup of modern culture as
a necessity for the purpose of accounting for value and exchanges of value in our own modern
culture, just as writing did for the Sumerians. In other words, as culture-money, it appears that
Bitcoin is valued for its ability to create and exchange various forms of commercial, cultural, and
social value that may not be possible with common currency; this theory is also testable.

Summary and Conclusion

In summary, we have identified, named, described, and interpreted the five types of
value systems in the Bitcoin community according to what we believe are the most
likely explanations for their existence. Each type represents its own internally consis­
tent theory of Bitcoin value and the value system of the people who belong to that
type; collectively, the five types represent the complementary value system of the
Bitcoin community. We have proposed several testable theories that may explain the
existence of these five types: theories of money and currency, risk and value, and
culture and society; all of these are testable and subject to subsequent scrutiny, or
alternative theories may be posed to explain our observations. The theories may be
tested in either the subjective mode by future Q-method research or in the objective
mode by the usual hypothetico-deductive theory testing methods. Our research vali­
dates only the five types reported here and hints at some similarities with types
observed in unpublished research, but because our Q-set is only a sample of the
universe of concourse on the topic, subsequent research with different Q-sets may
confirm that the same types are generalizable to other cryptocurrencies. This study has
also demonstrated how concourse theory, Q-methodology, and abductive reasoning are
relevant to understanding subjective valuation and value systems. Our research has
exploratory and developmental goals, but future research on this topic with a more
focused Q-set may test our findings at greater levels of precision and may reveal
additional types of cryptocurrency value systems that are not observed by our research.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 493

Notes
1. We conducted the statistical analysis using PQmethod software (version 2.35), which is free­
ware available for download at http://schmolck.org/qmethod.

Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge Professor Brian Haig for his expert advice about our discussion of
abduction and Paula Wingreen for proofreading the final draft of this paper. We also thank the
editor-in-chief and the reviewers for their work in helping us craft a better paper.

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About the Authors

Stephen C. Wingreen (stephen.wingreen@canterbury.ac.nz; corresponding author) is Associate
Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand, where he leads the Special Interest Group for Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.
Dr. Wingreen pursues scholarly interests in the fields of emerging technologies, technology and
culture, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, information privacy and ethics, electronic commerce trust,
and applications of Q-methodology and concourse theory in the decision sciences. His research has
recently appeared in Information Systems Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Industrial Management
and Data Systems, Electronic Commerce Research, and Frontiers in Blockchain, among others.
Donncha Kavanagh (donncha.kavanagh@ucd.ie) is Full Professor of Information & Organisation at
the University College Dublin Business School in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Kavanagh’s research interests
include the sociology of knowledge and technology, the history and philosophy of management
thought, money, play, and ethics. He has published widely in the fields of information and organiza­
tion, management, marketing, organization studies, and engineering.
Paul John Ennis (paul.ennis@ucd.ie) is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the College of Business,
University College Dublin.
Gianluca Miscione (gianluca.miscione@ucd.ie) is a faculty member at the School of Business of
University College Dublin, Ireland. He conducted and contributed to research in Europe, Latin
America, India, and East Africa and on the Internet. His research focuses on the interplay between
technologies and organizing processes with a specific interest in innovation, development, organiza­
tional change, social networks, and trust.
496 S. C. WINGREEN ET AL.

Appendix
Supplemental Survey of Related Factors
(Open-ended follow-up question)
Please explain briefly your rationale for why you sorted the statements as you did:
(Follow-up survey questions)
Rate your level of knowledge about Bitcoin: novice 1 2 3 4 5 6 expert
Rate your level of experience with Bitcoin (as a user): novice 1 2 3 4 5 6 expert
Rate your level of experience with Bitcoin (as a developer): novice 1 2 3 4 5 6 expert
Do you own, or have you owned any Bitcoin? Yes/No.
Rate your level of knowledge about Money Systems: novice 1 2 3 4 5 6 expert
Rate your level of risk tolerance-risk aversion: risk averse 1 2 3 4 5 6 risk tolerant
Area(s) of special interest with regard to Bitcoin (check all that apply):

Fintech Legal
Application Development Technical
Government Ethical

Condition of instruction: “The Bitcoin community should prioritize . . . ”

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