DARPA-funded study examines how cryptography spreads on Reddit



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A science laboratory from the US Department of Energy is studying the performance of three popular cryptos in Reddit discussions.

According to a press release provided exclusively to CoinDesk, data badysts from the North West Pacific National Laboratory (PNNL) measured the speed and magnitude of discussions relating to three crypto-currencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero , on Reddit. For the study, they badyzed data covering a three-year period from January 2015 to January 2018.

Of the three cryptos, they found that bitcoin was the most discussed topic, with 3,600 comments posted each day. It's far ahead of Ethereum and Monero, who have an average of 500 and 380 comments per day, respectively.

The PNNL study, funded in particular by DARPA, also showed that people responded more quickly to bitcoin messages, taking an average of 11 minutes to start collecting comments.

The monero and ethereum publications, on the other hand, took an average of 20 minutes and 27 minutes, respectively, for the discussion to start. Discussions on Bitcoin were also the fastest, followed by Ethereum and Monero.

All this is perhaps to be expected, Bitcoin being the main cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization and media exposure. However, there were more surprising results.

As for the duration of a discussion, it is monero who has achieved the longest median lifespan. The Ethereum sets, on the other hand, had the longest possible lifetime, while the bitcoin discussions had the lowest median lifetime of the three pieces.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have also produced five times more ineffective messages – those who do not collect comments – than monero.

The PNNL study, led by Dr. Svitlana Volkova, was launched to better understand online communication patterns and develop a quantitative framework for how this information spreads, according to the press release.

Volkova said:

"Cryptocurrencies are observable units of information that are quite unique in the way that discussions about them propagate on social platforms. … These social cues are very useful and, by integrating them into the machine and deep learning, we intend to build predictive models that rely on cause-and-effect relationships between different variables in order to explain the decision-making processes of the models. "

PNNL added that the badysis presented in its study could be used to inform various badyzes of the financial markets. The lab intends to expand its research on spreading cryptocurrency discussions with other viral trends, such as the spread of computer vulnerabilities and misinformation.

The PNNL study was presented at the 2019 Web Conference in San Francisco, California on May 17 and can be viewed online here.

Reddit image via Shutterstock

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