Ledger, a journal about cryptocurrency and blockchain research

Ledger a journal about cryptocurrency and blockchain research

ledgerjournal.org

The purpose of this thread is to serve as a public discussion board for any topic related to the aims, scope, policies and administration of the journal Ledger. Ledger's mission is to:

Firstly, “place before the general public the grand results” of cryptocurrency work and discovery, and “urge the claims of [this research] to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.”[1]

Secondly, aid members of the research community themselves, by giving them timely and authoritative information of advances made in any branch of cryptocurrency research throughout the world.

Thirdly, build an academic and interdisciplinary communication channel that will allow bright minds in economics, sociology, physics, law and political science to contribute at the highest level towards the evolution of Bitcoin.

I invite anyone interested in scholarly publishing for this nascent field of research to contribute to this thread.

[1] No Author. “Nature’s mission statement.” Nature (1869) (accessed 15 July 2015) http://www.nature.com/npg_/company_info/mission.html

 

Reserved

 

This is great news. I just started up a research together with the embassy in Amsterdam about the psychological factors that influence the adoption process of bitcoin. As an economical psychologist this is my field. I will later write more about this since i am now travelling.

 

great to see the journal. its not the "journal of bitcoin", but ok!

also interesting that it is affiliated with U.Pitt. any insights into why U.Pitt is involved Peter?

oh, i see... im just getting caught up today. and good luck Peter. not exactly something i'd like to (or have the time to) add to my plate.

the Managing editor... who really likes to be a part of the publishing process
"Christopher E. Wilmer is an assistant professor in the Chemical & Petroleum Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published 25 peer-reviewed articles (over 1500 citations) and assisted in the launching of a new chemistry journal published by De Gruyter Open (formerly Versita). He has co-authored a book on Bitcoin called “Bitcoin for the Befuddled” which is published by No Starch Press."

 

@bucktotal

chriswilmer (who is co-managing editor) took a position as assistant professor at U Pitt in fall 2014 and learned about the great resource offered by their University Library System to help launch open-access journals just like this. After building an Editorial Team, we then submitted a proposal to create the journal, which was subsequently approved by the University.

 

@solex
@Peter R

yes, its a great name for that reason.

 

Thanks Peter for creating this thread! We should discuss review article topics!

 

I promised to write a reply here, so here it is.

I'm currently working on a research about the adoption of bitcoin, seen from a psychological perspective. This research is my Bachelor thesis for my graduation. I'm working on this research together with the bitcoin embassy in Amsterdam.

Since i started in September this means i'm just at the very beginning of this project. Currently i'm working on the theoretical model, which i aim to finish in two weeks. After that i will design a survey which will be spread over respondents all over the world.

The subject of the research is to look at what are the psychological factors that influence the adoption rate of bitcoin, so determinants of behavior in other words. Things i'm looking to measure are for example: what is the current attitude of the general populace towards bitcoin? What is the level of knowledge of the general populace about bitcoin? How important is safety/usability/relevance for them? What effect does the exchange rate have? Is there difference regarding these questions when comparing people from different part of the world?

Note that these questions can change depending on the outcome of my theoretical model en maybe input from here. I think this information will all be very relevant for marketing departments of bitcoin companies and i feel this is currently missing.

All input is very welcome and appreciated, hence why i am posting here. I'm as said currently working on the theoretical model. So if anyone has interesting literature about the adoption of new technologies, preferred from a psychological perspective, than this is very welcome at the moment. Also input and ideas about this research in general will be very much appreciated.

I will keep you all updated in this topic about the progress.

 

Sounds good Ivanhoe! As long as you put your research in its scholarly context, establish how your work is novel, and suggest some reviewers in your field, it can make for a great contribution to the journal!

 

@chriswilmer

congratulations on the journal Chris. quite a feather in your cap and seriously needed. i'm sure it will be the beginnings of great things to come.

 

i think this will be important work. not enough emphasis is given to the psychology of mkts, esp by programmers, who seem to think Bitcoin is a machine which responds simply to pushing and pulling of certain levers. that's impossible b/c Bitcoin represents an intersection of so many different hopes and desires of a diversity of participants. simply the fact that some of us are contrarians and purposely do the opposite of what we think the crowds will do is evidence enough.

good luck on your study and let us know if there's anything we can do to help.

 

Yes, that's a good idea.

Background: There's a lot of important information and research scattered across BitcoinTalk, mailing lists, IRC, etc. During the round-table discussions at ScalingBitcoin, it was agreed that amalgamating the best parts of this into cohesive review articles was an important task. Ledger would like to assist in this process.

The journal has a small amount of funds (~1 BTC / article) to award honorariums for authors who write such review articles (pending successful peer review).

The question, however, is what are some good topics?

(BTW, we are also interested in much broader review articles [a scholarly version of Wences's talk, for instance])

 

@theZerg

Great! We need more skilled reviewers! Would you mind registering yourself at the journal's website (ledgerjournal.org) as a reader or author, and then I can manually create a "reviewer" profile for you? It would be ideal if you could note your reviewing interests in your profile along with a brief bio.

 

Here are two Reddit posts to discuss "How to Write and Format an Article for Ledger":

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3lxykp/how_to_write_and_format_an_article_for/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ly0qn/how_to_write_and_format_an_article_for/

 

Ledger was mentioned in the issue of Nature that came out today. For those that don't know, Nature is the world's most cited scientific journal (impact factor = 42.4).