Bitcoin Forum

I first heard of Bitcoin in the year 2015. I didn't get involved, which is my greatest regret till date. Though I was not presented with an opportunity to join, it was just like an information gotten on the air. In as much as I wasn't part of the community, yet I wasn't against bitcoin. I saw it only as an evolving technology which everyone might likely get involved.

But few weeks ago, I encountered a high profile learned man, putting up logical criticism and accusations on bitcoin. I was greatly astonished, because I used to think that only the unlearned are against bitcoin.

After such an experience, I decided to conduct a questionnaire about bitcoin acceptance in my immediate and extended neighbourhood. With a mixed target audience of educated and uneducated. I have the data and chart, maybe whenever I learn how to use graphics in the forum I'll edit the thread and upload them.

My questions were;
1. What is Bitcoin?
2. Do you own bitcoin?
3. What can you say about bitcoin?
I used an open -ended question approach in order to avail my audience the opportunity to express themselves.

MY FINDINGS:
1. People who know nothing/little about Bitcoin are more interested to know than the ones with half baked information about Bitcoin.
2. The educated audience are the ones labeling Bitcoin as scam.
3. There are still people who has internet access, yet knows nothing about bitcoin. This group don't have interest in bitcoin maybe because they have a stable and permanent busy job which they relied wholly on.

I highlighted the Criticism, Arguments and Submissions of the educated in my questionnaire below; and tried to analysis why they are yet to accept Bitcoin.

1. UNDERSTANDING:
Some people are rigid in nature and do not embrace what they don't understand the A -Z. Since they are not involved in the process of making Bitcoin, hence they are gripped by the fear of the unknown. Yes, some of the people in this category made an infant step to know Bitcoin, due to the complex algorithms, they retrieve with misinformation. This group needs to be unlearned and re-learned.

2. NON TANGIBILTY OF BITCOIN:
Some do not believe bitcoin because it is not a physical asset. They want something that can be seen. It seems that their sense of ownership is in the sight. Once seen, they can be sure that they are the real owners and as such can transfer same to their heirs.

3. INDIVIDUALS DO NOT CREATE A CURRENCY.
This particular one is only peculiar to my uncle. I have heard it severally and only from him. According to him, individuals do not create a currency, only government does and regulates it, therefore bitcoin is a scam of the century. He always assure me that he will be alive to see that there is nothing like Bitcoin again.

4. BITCOIN IS A BUBBLE:
People in this category believe bitcoin does not have value as gold. According to Joel -KFC manager "it is a bubble inflated by desperate people, that will burst" Though when asked when to expect the bursting, he had no specific date.

5. PEACE OF MIND:
A pensioner said, he didn't continue his Bitcoin journey because it doesn't give him peace of mind. Even, when he decided to leave his investment for long, price updates keep attracting him there. He decided to withdraw all in order to have peace of mind.

6. ANONYMITY:
People in this group says no one is to be held responsible, no country and no authority. That is why Bitcoin is always used for fraudulent activities. That it is a scam currency created to compliment crime.

CONCLUSION:
This project made me understand that the enemies or people campaigning against Bitcoin are not the novice but the misinformed, the narcissist and people unwilling to embrace change.
This thread is therefore to gather information that will form the bases for my campaign in my second outing.
Thank you all.

This is both funny and sad at the same time. I guess this has something to do with our basic human psychology. I have known a lot of people, and perhaps myself included, who cannot resist the urge to check on the price almost every once in a short while, even if right from the get-go the intention was to invest and HODL for the longest term possible.

To some, however, rather than removing price monitoring apps, resisting the urge to intentionally check on it, or even forgetting it altogether, they'd rather get out of it entirely. I don't quite understand their frame of mind but it just seems there are way too emotional people and that Bitcoin's bumpy ride may not be for them.

@Darker45, this may be related to a saying that, wherever your treasure is, there your mind would be. This would be frequent with people that invested what they cannot afford to lose in the system.

Your questions were really qualitative, not quantitative, which makes it more difficult to chart in an objective manner. In any case, if you wish to include the charts, you can simply upload them to an image hosting site such as imgur, and the post the BBCode link that it provides for every image you upload. Then it’s only down ensuring the size of the base image is under 2,5 mb, and formatting the position and size here for adequate display.

There are guides around here, such as  Guideline on posting images (with size adjustments), hyperlinks (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3974517.0)


Additionally, it would be interesting to include information on the methodology used. By that I mean how many people were surveyed, how many answered, where it took place, by what means did they take the survey, how were they selected, and so forth.

What theory did you use to analyze your research I think it will be more objective and complete to state the theoretical framework used for this research, also you failed to mention one other set of people that are against bitcoin and this class of people is those who get too greedy that lead to they lose and at the end call Bitcoin scam

So did you commit a community survey yourself or just asked few of your relatives and friends through this questionnaire? Please upload the sample one for us as said by @DdmrDdmr which will help us to know how did you draft the questionnaire.Rest there are many findings and it is good to see that you took that personal effort for this and concluded the results.Like some of finding were relevant to actual world mentality like a old man who is earning pension would not risk his funds to invest in bitcoin as high volatility could end up his all savings in just one go and that's why they risk it and peace of mind is lost for them in that age also.Second many people still have the thinking that btc is annoymous and can be used for illegal and fraudulent activities so you need to have a sample for that questions also that gives clarification like it is not anonymous and you can track the transactions.But overall good effort on your behalf and paste the findings here for sure.

As DdmrDdmr says.

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But a comment -- definitely an over-generalisation I feel on the "educated" portion. My own anecdotal experience sees no real difference in education level though perhaps on field of education -- as they are more educated they do appear to be more wealthy, and therefore, with more access and disposable income.

Looking back at past experimental currencies, it's been the same. First access and users were educated people and wealthier ones (you do need money after all and capital to experiment) but the skepticism that comes is quite normal with new tech. And the last to experiment will always be from those experienced or knowledgeable in established paradigms.

So those most likely to consider Bitcoin a scam come from... finance and banking. Just my small experience.

Educational variable is the most bias variable because in developing nations, you will have to face with inaccuracy when you collecting samples with questions related to educational levels.

Additionally, other variables such as age distribution, socioeconomic status (SES), etc can make sense on the exposure, acceptance for Bitcoin/cryptocurrency.

It is not a serious recommendation because you already collected data but some points are important for surveys:

• Sample size
• Sampling method

If you want to extrapolate the result from your sample to a specific population, then sample size and sampling method will be important. If your sampling method is bad, your sample can not represent that target population and you can not extrapolate results to the target population.

Result you get will only represent for that specific sample.

• Socioeconomic status (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status)
• Bitcoiners' Demographic over years (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5291907.0)

Well said sir! The questions were open ended questions, sometimes presented orally as an interview. I did it to know the level of acceptance and perception about Bitcoin. After getting my response I came up with my personal findings. Yes, I didn't have enough numbers to come up with comprehensive charts, I only made a chat of Educated against the Uneducated perception of BTC in my neighbour. Which is not elaborate and tends to deviate from the original purpose of the questionnaire. Bringing it up now would tend to raise more questions. After reading through the comments here, I'll try to tend towards quantitative research this time around, more elaborate and professional. I appreciate your teaching on how to upload images, am going to try it out. Thanks!

I was expecting to see an information concerning what you have to say about the future of bitcoin, just to get your own view on your questionnaire or survey. By the way this research was done by only you providing these information or you made holistic enquiry on the questionnaire to people you don't know from the beginning.

There are few types of question in questionnaires

• Open-ended
• Fill-in-the-blank
• Close-ended

In most cases, close-ended can be the best. It is most convenient for interview, data collection as well as later data cleaning and analysis. However, it does requires the researcher has to have enough experience and get narrow down the list of very possible answers (choices).

Open-ended type is bad because you will get troubles for later data processing. I don't say one questionnaire should not have a single open-ended question but you should not design too many questions like that.

Close-ended questions can give choices like categorical or ordinal options. Ordinal means you can give some degrees or intensity levels for possible answers. It is more quantitative.

Choose what type of question depends on your experience with survey and expectation from your specific survey.

It can be different from demographics, SES, etc.

What do you mean by educated and uneducated here? Is it about subjective perception of one's familiarity with Bitcoin? Or is it about the level of education (unrelated to Bitcoin) that someone obtained? You're saying that the educated audience says it's a scam, which is why I'm interested to know who are these people and how educated (and in what) are they. Regarding #5, I think volatility can be troublesome to many people when they start learning about Bitcoin. Some see it as a feature, but for many it's more of a bug.
You can make the charts in Excel or whatever, and then make screenshots and upload them via Imgur or some other website as pictures, by the way.

Can't agree more! People are indeed misinformed. Banks and traditional Financial corporations are taking the lead to deliberately spread the misinformation. I often receive emails from my banks where they try to promote their own financial products and bitcoin always make appearances to those mailers where they advise people to stay away from bitcoin. Banks have their own agenda, no doubt! But that's how the misinformation spreads like wildfire. But unfortunately we can't do anything either because bitcoin is not yet legal in my country.

Very true sir, this was a big headache to me. That is why I tried to be less objective. However, it was the best available approach for me. If I tried using the alternative (Close ended), I might likely be trapped by this;

While I have heard people saying the points 1, 2, 4 and 6, I have never heard anyone mentioning the points 3 and 6.
I feel pity for the people who believe in point 3 that individuals don't create a currency.
Point 6 is quite valid though because not everyone can handle the volatility of bitcoin.
While it doesn't affect me I can understand how it must be affecting those who put their hard earned savings into bitcoin and keep seeing it increase and decrease in minutes.
Such people should just avoid using bitcoin and try to be patient while they invest in it.

You seem to fall under the fallacy of presuming that everybody thinks just like you. The above assumption is totally wrong.
Firstly, it is like 6 billion people currently with access to the internet. An overwhelming percentage knows what bitcoin is. However, many still think it is a currency you can use on the internet for payments, while this feature has long gone for BTC.

Secondly, you seem to think that the reason someone doesn't want to invest in Bitcoin is that he/she doesn't have a stable and permanent job.
On the contrary, an even more overwhelming majority of those that invest in Bitcoin have a stable job with a stable income.
Moreover, we have seen since last year investment funds, institutions, billionaires, and big companies investing in Bitcoin.
To end this, those that don't have a stable job will probably instead try to reduce their exposure and risk to affordable levels, since they will not have a future income to back their losses in case their investment goes bad.

This actually makes sense to me. Being educated means you have a huge grasp of knowledge on a topic, thus makes you question it's lacking
#notcryptorelated  Also, just like how fanbases work, you have the potential to become the biggest hater of your favorite artist.

I am sorry for not drawing a clear distinction about education in this context. However, uneducated(unrelated to bitcoin) will narrowly become educated (related to bitcoin). But in this context, the education used referred to bitcoin related, as it's uncultured and difficult to classify people as educated and uneducated in comparative studies.