The Ascent of Bitcoin: Bibliometric Analysis of Bitcoin Research

Abstract

Blockchain is a path-breaking paradigm, and cryptocurrencies are one of the main application areas of Blockchain technology. Bitcoin leads the cryptocurrency markets, both in terms of market capitalization and in scientific interest. In this paper, we performed a comprehensive bibliometric study of the Bitcoin-related literature. Using the Scopus database, we created a sample that comprises 4495 documents written in the 2011–2020 period. Furthermore, we provided insights about dimensions such as the change in the number of publications over the course of years, the main research areas, types of published documents, most important platforms and sources of Bitcoin publications, highly cited studies, productive authors, author’s countries, and finally main funders of Bitcoin-related research. Lastly, our bibliometric study manifests the current state and future path of Bitcoin literature from distinct perspectives.

Runtime Evolution of Bitcoin's Consensus Rules

“…Finding relevant samples became simpler from the fall of 2015 as the weekly meetings could be collected. A challenge with the IRC logs has been that the logs are somewhat dispersed between different archives [12,[28][29][30].…”