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Design for Trust: An Exploration of the Challenges and Opportunities of Bitcoin Users

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which has received increasing interest over the last five years. Built upon a decentralized peer to peer system, it supports transparent, fast, cost effective, and irreversible transactions, without the need for trusting third party financial institutions. We know however little about people's motivation and experience with bitcoin currency. This paper reports on interviews with 20 bitcoin users in Malaysia about their experience and trust challenges. Findings show that bitcoins are used more as store of value for speculative investment or savings' protection. The paper advances the HCI theories on trust by identifying main bitcoin characteristics and their impact on trust, such as decentralization, unregulation, embedded expertise, and reputation, as well as transactions' transparency, low cost, and easiness to complete. We discuss insecure transactions, the risk of dishonest traders and its mitigating strategies. The paper concludes with design implications including support for the transparency of two-way transactions, tools for materializing trust, and tools for supporting reversible transactions.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. bitcoin users
    2. blockchain
    3. dishonest traders
    4. risks
    5. trust

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)Bitcoin Use Cases: A Scoping ReviewChallenges10.3390/challe1501001515:1(15)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Three Essays on Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: The Perspective of Influencer Movement Effect, Exchange Security and Regulationundefined10.12794/metadc2356197Online publication date: Jul-2024
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