Decentralized Opinion Leadership: A Study of Crypto Influencers in the Twitter Discourse on Bitcoin

Abstract

Based on 115 million Bitcoin-related tweets from 2009 to 2022, we propose an opinion leader index (OLI) for decentralized technologies, such as Bitcoin, and identify the foremost Bitcoin opinion leaders (N=218 BOLs). The OLI consists of a scoring scheme for social media opinion leader classification along six criteria: audience engagement, niche alignment, reputation, audience reach, activity, and consistency. We further classify BOLs into eight archetypes and show that their tweet activity strongly correlates with Bitcoin price performance. Linguistic content analysis reveals that each BOL archetype exhibits a distinct communication style and content focus, with themes ranging from financial and technological aspects to power and politics. Our study advances the field by introducing a classification approach for social media opinion leaders in the context of decentralized technologies. We derive future research avenues for other decentralized contexts across different social media platforms and further measures of opinion leader influence.