Four major types of Bitcoin users: What do they think about the issue of capacity expansion?

Dr Paul Ennis is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Technological Organisational Innovation at University College Dublin, specialising in Bitcoin and blockchain research.

In this article, Dr. Ennis discusses the main types of Bitcoin users and their different views on how the technology should develop.

There are many fantasies about Bitcoin users: weirdos, dreamers, nerds, criminals, idealists, and so on.

But what do they really look like?

Some of these assumptions are true in some cases, but the reality is not that simple. Of course, one of the simplest, but still effective ways to find out who is using Bitcoin is to analyze Google Trends, as we found in the study by Yelowitz and Wilson (2015).

While it’s not a perfect methodology because “search queries do not necessarily imply active participation,” Yelowitz and Wilson identified four types of Bitcoin users: computer programming enthusiasts, speculators, libertarians, and criminals.

This result fits the “expected” profile of a Bitcoin user very well, and is close to the results of a 2013 survey of 1,000 Bitcoin users, which found that the “typical user is a 32-year-old liberal-minded male.”

(Author: I am a 32 year old male, but not a liberal).

According to different types of Bitcoin users, the reasons that attract them to Bitcoin are:

1. For computer programmers, mining brings rewards;

2. For speculators, Bitcoin’s volatility;

3. For libertarians, Bitcoin lacks regulation;

4. For criminals, Bitcoin is considered anonymous;

Different views on expansion

When it comes to understanding Bitcoin, we often find that the debate centers around whether it is a currency, as well as the understanding of regulatory and legal terms.

Bitcoin users often seem conflicted on this issue. On the one hand, they want Bitcoin to change, and they want to see more people using it.

This conflict helps explain different perspectives on why the community is close to splitting over the scaling debate. For example, one of the social reasons miners were drawn to BIP 100 (proposed by developer Jeff Garzik) was that it would allow miners to play an active voting role in the future of the Bitcoin Core reference client.

Some speculators will choose to support Bitcoin Classic because it means Bitcoin will offer faster transaction speeds and they hope that Bitcoin will grow faster.

Libertarians are caught somewhere in the middle. They don’t want miners to become too centralized, but they seem to be aware of the fact that the Bitcoin Core development community can also be seen as a centralized structure. They also want more people to use Bitcoin in an ideal world, but they also want to avoid catastrophic hard forks that could jeopardize the future of the Bitcoin network.

As for the criminals, they don't seem to care about this, and their opinions have never been published in the mainstream media.

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/four-types-bitcoin-users/
By Dr Paul Ennis
Translation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/four-types-bitcoin-users ‎‎)