What Motivates Bitcoin Miners to Practice Bitcoin Mining: An Assessment Based on Behavioral Reasoning Theory

Bitcoin trading offers security, ownership verifications, easy transactions, and traceability in almost every sector and industry. The base of Bitcoin is blockchain technology, which uses a mining process to secure and validate Bitcoin transactions. With promising positive returns, Bitcoin mining demands large energy and material resources and contributes to environmental degradation. The study uses behavioral reasoning theory to understand intentions to practice Bitcoin mining. We present a relative view of personal, technological, psychological, and environmental factors that attract or repel miners to perform Bitcoin mining, where the institutional environment moderates the relationship between attitude and intention by analyzing the cross-sectional data from 308 Bitcoin miners. The study indicates that attracting factors positively and significantly explain miners' attitudes, which leads to positive intentions toward Bitcoin mining. The regulatory environment weakens the positive relationship between attitude and intentions. The study provides a comparative view of facilitating and inhibiting factors with significant implications for academicians and policymakers.