Towards the Psychological Profile of Cryptocurrency Early Adopters: Overconfidence and Self-control as Predictors of Cryptocurrency Use

There is a growing interest in cryptocurrencies. While for the first several years, it was virtually only tech-savvy enthusiasts who used cryptocurrencies mostly mined by themselves, current users are more diverse, use traditional currencies to buy cryptocurrencies and there is no clear personality profile of them. This article attempts to fill the gap, and to investigate whether overconfidence and self-control could help explain cryptocurrency use among current early adopters. Overconfidence was measured using extraversion and agreeableness. Previously, it used to be proxied through gender. Self-control was estimated based on the number of types cybercrimes (finalized or at least attempted) the respondent was a victim to. To investigate the relationship between overconfidence, self-control, gender and cryptocurrency use, we analyze a binary logistic model where all the variables significantly contribute towards explanation of cryptocurrency use.
The findings are that cryptocurrency early adopters are more overconfident (lower in agreeableness, higher in extraversion), have a lower self-control, and are mostly men (what probably additionally supports overconfidence and possibly also low self-control). Specifically, men were more than three times as likely to use cryptocurrencies compared to women. The results hold for the full model and all sub-models including bi-variate testing.