To Fork or Not to Fork? Bitcoin Forks' Success Analysis Using Twitter Data: Preliminary Results

Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency. It is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls it and everyone can take part. And Bitcoin, just like any other open-source projects, has been subject to forks.In this paper, we will consider some popular Bitcoin forks and we will examine if we can find a link between the value of the fork (i.e. its price) and the overall sentiment of the fork based on Twitter data. The forks we consider here are: Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin Diamond (BCD), Bitcoin Private (BTCP), Bitcoin Atom (BCA), and Bitcoin SV (BSV). From the results, we can state that, for most cryptocurrencies studied here, the number of tweets follows the price trend more closely than the sentiment evolution does.The findings can have practical implications for both researchers and practitioners, indeed the results: (i) can be a stepping stone for future research on hard forks, (ii) can help practitioners identify the relevant indicators for hard forks price evolution.