Speaker:

Lynette Shaw - Assistant Professor, Department of Complex Systems and
Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan

Title:

What's a Bitcoin Worth? Valuation and Categorization in the Rise of Digital Currency

Abstract:

The first posted exchange rate for Bitcoin in 2009 was around $0.001 (USD) = 1 BTC. Just over eight years later, in mid-December 2017, it reached an inconceivable high of over $19,000 (USD) = 1 BTC, only to lose near 40% of its value the following month. Along with this dramatic ride in its price came a new wave of attention from mainstream audiences who brought with them a lot of questions - the two biggest being ‘What is Bitcoin?’ and ‘Why is it worth anything?’

This talk will offer some answers to these questions from a sociological perspective. The first part will use a computational modeling approach to help clarify how it is that this “something out of nothing” quality can arise out of social valuation processes. The second part will apply existing theories of categorization and market valuation to empirical evidence from the documented history of Bitcoin’s development, venture capital funding trends, and text scraped from thousands of news articles to explore the role different groups’ definitions of Bitcoin have played in constituting its current level of value and what this might entail for cryptocurrency’s future.

Speaker Bio:

Lynette Shaw is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in Complex Systems. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2016. Her research interests include cognition and culture, economic sociology, social theory, computational social science, complex systems, automated text analysis, and statistical methodologies.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between.

Live Stream:

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