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.

Given the growing pervasiveness of information systems (IS) in everyday life, recent research has acknowledged that IS technologies are often not value free but are instead infused with fundamental personal values. However, little is known about how such values explain why people assimilate these technologies and their affordances. In the intriguing case of Bitcoin, personal values—especially libertarian political values—played an essential role in clarifying the ideological underpinnings of Bitcoin and its early adoption. Consequently, we draw on research on personal values and affordance theory to develop and test a model explicating how these personal values guide individuals toward using IS applications with salient affordances that address their values. Specifically, we hypothesize and test how individuals’ personal values (i.e., libertarian political values) influence their attitudes toward Bitcoin affordances and their Bitcoin use behavior using data from a multiple administration survey of 236 users and nonusers of Bitcoin. Our results indicate that libertarian political values affect individuals’ attitudes toward Bitcoin affordances, which in turn mediate the effects of these values on actual Bitcoin use. Our findings advance the field by demonstrating the importance of integrating values into the conceptualization of IS technology affordances.

Business angels (BAs) provide important sources of funding for new ventures seeking external financing and are crucial to entrepreneurial finance as they fill the equity gap in the early start-up stage. However, little is known about the impact of characteristics of BAs, namely socio-demographics, human capital and the social network, on the success of their funded start-ups. To address this gap, we analyze a novel dataset of 2,059 first-round investments. We show that U.S. angel investors and BAs who are generally specialized in their academic field of study or (formerly) practicing their professions in an executive management position increase the amount of funds raised. Furthermore, we introduce online social capital and validate the hypothesized benefits of angels’ offline social capital. Our findings point to specific variables which can be targeted by entrepreneurial finance to enhance new ventures’ performance with respect to the amount of funding they receive.