New survey data highlights the ideological and economic factors driving some investors to purchase bitcoin.
A new report published today by LendEDU – which has conducted several similar studies in the past year – details the responses from 564 poll-takers. Of those, roughly 40% of participants said that they invested in bitcoin because they believe it is "a world changing technology."
Twenty-one percent of those involved say its because bitcoin is "a long term store of value, like gold or silver", with roughly 15% of those saying they bought in because a friend or family member recommended it. Those who said they think the price is "too low" accounted for 14% of respondents, while just 8% said they planned to use bitcoin as a payment method.
Notably, the survey also asked at which price participants would choose to sell their holdings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the average of the amounts cited came out to a whopping $196,165.79 per bitcoin. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $7,680, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI).
Plan to HODL?
Further, many of those who responded to the survey don't appear to be in any rush to sell off their investments anytime soon.
"We found that about a third, 32.62 percent, of respondents have sold some of their Bitcoin since investing. However, we found that the majority of investors, 67.38 percent, have not sold any of their Bitcoin investments since purchasing," LendEDU wrote in its report.
On average, investors owned just under $3,000 in bitcoin. While 16.5 percent of these owners plan to sell within a year, 20 percent plan to hold the cryptocurrency for at least seven years.
Another noteworthy data point: just over a third of survey-takers have no intention of reporting their trades to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which declared in 2014 that it would consider bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) as a kind of property for tax purposes.
"We found that the majority, 64.13 percent, of respondents are planning to report or have already reported their bitcoin transactions to the IRS. Although, it was interesting to see that over a third, 35.87 percent, of our respondents are not planning to report their transactions to the IRS," LendEDU wrote.
The survey follows two others from September and October, which indicated that younger people are becoming increasingly aware of bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies.