Paper Title (use style: paper title)
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 1
Islamic View Towards Bitcoin
Abstract
This paper proposes to analyze the agent behavior by means of big
data extracted from the search engine « Google trends » and
Twitter API to visualize the emotions and the manner of thinking
about « Bitcoin » in the Islamic context. Two kinds of sentiment
measures are constructed. The first is based on search query of the
word « Bitcoin » with religious connotation in all over the world
from 14/04/2017 to 14/04/2018 in weekly frequency. The second is
built on twitter data from 03/04/2018 to 13/04/2018, by using a
Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural
language processing modules to assign emotions and sentiment
orientations. In the next step, the Granger causality analysis is used
to investigate the hypothesis that this sentiment causes the
volatility and the returns of « Bitcoin ». The results show that, at a
first-level that twitter users of the word « Islamic Bitcoin »
improve positive sentiment. Secondly, the Twitter sentiment
measure has a significant effect on lagged Bitcoin returns and
volatility. Furthermore, this sentimental variable Granger causes
Bitcoin returns and volatility.
This study contributes to the literature by studying the influence of
the doctrinal view towards Bitcoin on his prices dynamics.
Knowing that Bitcoin is a new financial asset and there is a large
debate on his compliance with shariah
Keywords-component; Bitcoin, microblogging,
sentiment analysis, text minig, Islamic finance.
I. INTRODUCTION
The development of information technology over the past
two decades has changed the ways of generating, processing
and transmitting information and thus profoundly influenced
the asset prices in capital markets. A huge volume of
searches, news, comments and recommendations are
generated daily on social media, from which behavioral
economics researchers extract proxies reflecting investor
sentiment.
In particular, Bitcoin gained increasing media attention in
social networks. Bitcoin is a form of cryptocurrency
introduced by Nakamoto (2008). It is a payment system
based on blockchain.
Muslim people occupy an important space from the world.
They present over than 23,4% from all the world in 2011.
Some of them which are looking for satisfying their
religious needs are focusing on the sharia compatible degree
of the Bitcoin [1]. Many studies have focused on studying
the Muslim psychology [2] and the Islamic market [3][4]
[5].
In order to measure investor sentiment, empiricists use
sentiment analysis approach which is a process of detecting
the contextual polarity of the text. It determines whether a
given text is positive, negative or neutral. In this analysis,
the opinions about «Bitcoin» combined to «Islam » are
collected from the users of different social media and
classified by their polarity.
Furthermore, behavioural Science uses search query data to
analyze the degree of users’ attention towards these terms.
In fact, it constitutes a mean of sentiment analysis.
In this paper, we propose a semantic approach to discover
user attitude and business insights from social media and
web users. For this purpose, we will first give brief literature
in section1. Then, in the second section, we will try to
visualize the attention of internet users of the word
«Bitcoin» in the context of religions and beliefs by means of
« Google trends ». In the third section, we will focus on the
Twitter user’s emotion and polarity who interact around the
subject « Bitcoin » in Islamic doctrine. A measure of
sentiment will be associated with this category of Twitter
users. This sentiment will be used to test our hypothesis of
the existence effect caused by this sentiment. This
methodology will be explained in section 4.
The results will be discussed in section 5. Finally, we
will conclude by some remarks.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS
DEVELOPMENT
Actually, many studies using Google Trends have
demonstrated several examples of how the search volume
for keywords coincides with as many patterns showing how
these kinds of correlation hold for many local phenomena.
For instance, it seems that media providers and
policymakers are interested in looking at Google Trends in
order to determine the hot topics for their editorial content.
As an example, we can take a look on the case of a popular
political site which could benefit by looking at the current
hot queries and, consequently, writing down a post on the
site containing focused keywords so that Google can
quickly index the post. These examples are just some of the
many strategies adopted by SEO practitioners (Yun et al.).
The high penetration rate of the Internet [6] is not sufficient
to be representative of the entire population. In our case, we
are interested especially on the effect on financial markets,
traders and policy maker’s decisions. Furthermore, we
MNIF Emna, JARBOUI Anis
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 2
consider the fact that active users issue more queries than
less active ones, with the consequence of blinding the
weight carried by each user in creating the aggregated
queries. Accordingly, many other researchers focused on the
validity of search queries as potential indicators of public
opinion [7]. More optimistically, others have argued for
predictive models based on search query data (Varian and
Hal, 2015) and social media sentiments data (Ruths et al.,
2014) and (Asur, 2010).
As for [7] the views expressed in polls are solicited because
search users are volunteers; while survey pollsters, under the
pressure of survey staff, select respondents. The
discretionary nature of search behaviors loans verisimilitude
to the query data, which are not altered by search engines
[7].
[8] suggest that the data genrated by « Google Teends » has
an influence on the market movements. By analyzing
changes in query volumes on Google for terms related to
finance, they found patterns that can be interpreted as '' early
warning signs '' of shares to market movements.
Milas and C. Panagiotidis Th. (2014) attempted to explain
the influence degree of the information contained in social
media (Twitter and Facebook) and Web search queries
(Google) on financial markets. Using a multivariate system
and focusing on the peripheral countries of the euro area, the
GIIPS (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), they
showed that the discussion of social media and search
queries related to Greek debt crisis provide significant
information in the short term mainly to the bond yield
differential of GreekGerman state, even when other
financial control variables (default risk, liquidity risk, and
international risk) are recognized and to a much lesser
extent, Portuguese and Italian yield spreads.
D'Avanzo et al (2017) led an experimental framework
allowing the integration of Google search query data and
Twitter social data. They built a pipeline interrogating
Twitter to track, geographically, the feelings and emotions
of Twitter users about new trends. The core of the pipeline
is represented by a sentiment analysis framework using a
Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural
language processing modules to assign emotions and
sentiment by Twitter data.They employed the pipeline for
consumer electronics, healthcare and politics. Their results
show that the proposed approach in order to measure social
media sentiments, and emotions concerning the trends
emerged on Google searches is plausible.
[9] introduced the concept of divergence of sentiment to the
behavioral finance literature. They measured the distance
between people with the positive and negative sentiment on
a daily basis for 20 countries by using data from status
updates on Facebook. Their results showed that the
divergence of sentiment is positively related to trading
volume. They further predicted and found a positive relation
between the divergence of sentiment and stock price
volatility. They also compared the effect of the specific
country measures to a global measure of divergence of
sentiment. They found that the separate effects of specific
country and global divergence measures depend on a
country’s level of market integration.
[10] examined the relationship between investor attention
and Bitcoin fundamentals. He found that realized volatility
and volume have significant effect on the Bitcoin attention.
[11] used a dual process diffusion model to assess the
impact of Twitter and Google Trends on Bitcoin. They
showed in their results that Bitcoin prices are partially
influenced by the web and Twitter information.
Unfortunately, empirical studies focusing on the use of big
data to visualize the Islamic view are very rare. As we know
our work is the first empirical framework focusing on the
influence of the agent’s psychological component on the
Bitcoin by means of big data. For this purpose, we propose
the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis: The Twitter sentiment has an effect on the
contemporaneous and lagged bitcoin return and volatility.
III. SEARCH QUERY SENTIMENT
In this section, we will present the search query tool
generated by Google trends in order to build a measure of
investor sentiment based on the search query of the word «
Bitcoin » in the Islamic context.
A. Search query presentation
The service of google trends offers a curve representing an
indicator of the number of a term of research given in
function of time. The time scale goes back to January 1,
2004, and is up to about two days before the current date,
the updates are very fast. In addition, the user also has
access to news related to the curve, allowing him to draw
conclusions about the impact of such an event on the user’s
interest. In the end, the service details the most often related
to term research and a map seeing areas where the
expression is the most sought at the global, national and
regional levels, as well as cities. It is possible to enter up to
five terms and compare their developments.
In our methodology, the proposed measure is based
implicitly on the fact that people collect information on the
internet using search engines. Furthermore, search-based
sentiment measures are available in real time; as economic
fundamentals change over time, a high frequency sentiment
measure can carry out more precise empirical tests. Second,
such a measure reveals attitudes rather than inquire about
them [12]. While surveys lack cross-verified data on actual
behavior, search behavior proves to be this objective
external verification [13].
This framework exploits Google Trends, which summarizes
queries through the analysis of web users search behaviors
in order to find the most relevant queries related to « Bitcoin
» in the context of « Religions and beliefs ». Google Trends
is a tool designed for tracking the popularity of any given
search term over time [14]. We start then by introducing the
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
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word « Bitcoin » since 2004 in monthly frequencies with
religious connotation as shown in Figure1.
Figure 1. interest search evolution for the term “Bitcoin”, source «
Google trends »
Figure 1 represents the behaviour of the search query of the
word “Bitcoin” with religion and belief’s connotation from
the period between 14/04/2017 and 14/04/2018. In figure 1,
we can observe that the frequency of the term « Bitcoin » is
very high in the period between 17/11/2017 and 23/11/2017.
This period is marked by the remarkable evolution of the
“Bitcoin”.
Figure 2. Geographical Search query
Figure 2 shows that the word “Bitcoin” in the mentioned
context is very frequent in Slovenia, South Africa, Malaysia,
United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Croatia, Singapour,
Australia, and Pakistan.
B. Search query sentiment:
As we have previously reported, the investor sentiment is a
much-debated topic in behavioral finance. The researchers
were very interested in how to measure investor sentiment.
Some empiricists use indirect measures based on market
sentiment indices. We may mention for example the
approach of Baker and Wurgler (2006) offering an indirect
measure of investor confidence by using six "inputs".
Other empiricists use direct measurements with indices
based on surveys, such as the consumer confidence index or
"Consumenten Conjunctuur Onderzoek (CCO)" CBS
Netherlands
1
While this approach shows a clear theoretical
link of investor confidence, it has the disadvantage of taking
time in the polls and creating an offset [15]. In addition,
respondents are often biased by answering questionnaires ;
it is proving to be a difficult task to obtain sincere and
prudent responses by respondents [16].
Thus we will consider the series given by google trends as a
measure of the sentiment involving the degree of attention
paid by internet users for the word « Bitcoin » in the context
of « religion and beliefs ».
IV. TWITTER SENTIMENT
This framework is planned on the basis of two kinds of
analysis. The first aim at measuring the sentiment, while the
second one is oriented at estimating the emotions expressed
in posts broadcasted on social networks. Tweets are
retrieved by using Twitter APIs, exploiting the default
access level. By using a special account, Twitter APIs can
also provide two other levels of access, the firehose and the
gardenhose, returning, respectively, 100% and 10% of all
public tweets. The retrieved data of the tweet, contain other
features, such as date, source, type, profile, location, number
of favorited friends, followers, URL, hashtag, and so forth.
Relevant tweets were searched and extracted from Twitter
programmatically by using twitteR package, written in R
programming language. This comprehensive tweet search
was conducted between 03/04/2018 to 13/04/2018.
Consequently, the collection of related tweets was retrieved
and saved in csv files. The data in this file contained the
tweet information along with user information posting the
tweet. Posting dates were also substantial for the analyses.
However, not all the tweets had the posting date
information. The analyses in this study performed using the
tweets with no missing values.
1
www.cbs.nl
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During data cleaning, the retweets were also omitted as the
aim of this study is to specify the sentiments or opinions of
individuals and the retweets were not considered to reflect a
new personal opinion. Therefore, we removed retweets from
our analyses.
The language of each tweet is automatically detected and, if
it is different from English, an online translation service is
invoked, so as to translate in the best possible way the
currently examined tweet using only English. In fact,
according to [17], [18] and [19] in some cases a translation
procedure can be useful for detecting sentiment in language
other than English. At this point of the development of the
entire framework, this allows us to refine as much as
possible the modules as a function of only one language. All
tweets so obtained are, then, pre-processed as in the
following: stop words are filtered out, links and hashtag are
removed, and words of length less than three characters
were discarded before processing the text because they often
hide off-topic posts or even spam. The tweets containing
mainly abnormal sequences of characters were discarded
[20]. The processing step just described, culminates in the
intervention of the two modules of sentiment and emotion
analysis. In particular, the sentiment detection module
estimates the predominant orientation, i.e. positive or
negative, of each tweet. Simultaneously, the emotion
detection module identifies the emotions expressed by the
current tweet, giving as a result the predominant feeling
among one of the following: anger, disgust, fear, joy,
sadness, and surprise [21]. The choice of these six emotions
comes from the psychological evidence of human non-
verbally expressed emotions proposed by Ekman (1992).
Therefore, we introduce some details about both the
sentiment and emotion detection modules that, at this stage
of overall development of the framework, cover the most
important experimental role. Furthermore, some aspects of
the visualization module are also introduced.
A. Sentiment detection module
Sentiment detection module exploits different sentiment
detection tools, constituting a submodule, which can be
plugged or unplugged, at will. In particular, at present the
sentiment detection module exploits naive Bayes detection
algorithm as sentiment analysis tool. The dataset contains
941 terms, each of which is associated to a sentiment which
can be “positive” na¨ıve Bayes detection algorithm has been
trained on Wiebe’s subjectivity lexicon [22]; overall, or
“negative”. The learning module analyzes a given text and
for each polarity returns its absolute log likelihood
expressing that sentiment; results are then evaluated,
resulting in the most likely polarity
B. Emotion detection module
As well known, Tweets can express also emotions and, as
such, this module estimates the most appropriate one for
each tweet among the six basic emotions: anger, disgust,
fear, joy, sadness, surprise proposed by Ekman (1992). The
emotion detection module can exploit different emotion
detection tools, embedded as sub-modules, which can be
plugged or unplugged at will. In particular, two sub-
modules, a naive Bayes learning algorithm and a voter
algorithm have been at present plugged in the emotion
detection module. Each of them is briefly summarized
below:
• The simple voter algorithm uses the above-mentioned
lexicon by counting the number of occurrences of the anger,
disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise words contained in
the text. The majority of counts give the prevalent emotion
associated to the text message. If the text does not contain a
prevalent number of words expressing a given emotion, the
text message is labeled as carrying “no emotion”.
The outcome of each sub-module is the percentage of
retrieved tweets classified as expressing an emotion among
the aforementioned six or classified as “no emotion”.
Finally, the results coming from all the submodules on the
retrieved tweets are averaged, obtaining an “emotion”
distribution, obtaining: Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness, Surprise
and Anger, whereas the overall sum must be equal to 1. As
is the case for the sentiment module, results obtained from
all the retrieved tweets are averaged, and the averaged
distribution is the outcome of the module.
C. Visualization module
An overall result is therefore presented to the user in a
graphical manner, in order to help us in her decisional
process (Dhar, 2003). Data visualization offers to decision-
makers a way to make sense of large dataset, allowing the
discovering of patterns for decision support (White and
Colin, 2011). The user can decide also to plot and compare
the analysis results regarding different queries in order to
get an idea on the general feelings that arise from twitter
social network regarding specific themes or features of
interest. This feature can be helpful also for the comparison
of sentiments and emotions arising from tweets retrieved by
using different queries. This approach simplifies the
decisional process and allows overcoming the information
overload by quickly having an idea about the general
sentiment or emotions raised by news goods or aspects.
D. Experiments
We have implemented and tested the prototype employing «
Islamic » combined by « Bitcoin». The tweets retrieved in
this context are represented in table 1. In fact, as we have
said, the framework proposed represents for us an
experimental laboratory where we can test hypotheses and
models on different social phenomena, using social
behavioral data. We analyzed the word frequencies for
English tweets about “Islamic Bitcoin » using word clouds.
Their visualisation figures of emotions, polarity in figure 3.
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 5
TABLE I. BITCOIN TWEETS IN ISLAMIC CONTEXT
text favorited truncated screenName retweet
Count
isRet
weet
Retwee
ted
1 RT @APompliano: An
important Islamic scholar has deemed
Bitcoin to be compliant with Sharia law.
This means 1.6 BILLION
Muslims are now pe…
13/04/2018
20:28:57
Twitter for
iPhone
probabl
ysaif
218 TRUE
2 RT @APompliano: An
important Islamic scholar has deemed
Bitcoin to be compliant with Sharia law.
This means 1.6 BILLION
Muslims are now pe…
13/04/2018
20:28:45
Twitter for
iPhone
TheRea
lVherus
218 TRUE
3 RT @crypToBanger: @jack
"Islamic Scholar Declares
Bitcoin Sharia Law
Compliant, Potentially
Opening Market To 1.6
Billion Muslims"
13/04/2018
20:28:35
Twitter for
Android
adi014 9 21 TRUE
4 RT @APompliano: An
important Islamic scholar has deemed
Bitcoin to be compliant with Sharia law.
This means 1.6 BILLION
Muslims are now pe…
20:27:38
13/04/2018
Twitter for
Android
ColinC
allahan
46
218 TRUE
5 RT @APompliano: An
important Islamic scholar has deemed
Bitcoin to be compliant with Sharia law.
20:27:25
13/04/2018
Twitter for
Pupsric
s
218 TRUE
This means 1.6 BILLION
Muslims are now pe…
iPhone
6 #cryptocurrency #Bitcoin #halal (declared
permissible) under Sharia Law - 1.6
Billion Muslims can now enter crypto…
https://t.co/BQ0SKdS6sy
20:27:12
13/04/2018
Twitter
Web Client
LarryA
llhands
0 FALSE
The wordcloud is presented figure 4. These figures adress
the thinking style of Twitter users.
In fact, twitter users have a global positive view towards
“Islamic + Bitcoin”. Their emotion of “Joy” towards the two
cited words is dominant.
https://t.co/BQ0SKdS6sy
https://t.co/BQ0SKdS6sy
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 6
Figure 3. Sentiment analysis of tweets about Bitcoin (emotion and
polarity)
Figure 4. wordcloud of the term « Islamic Bitcoin »
E. Twitter sentiment indicator
In the next step we try to define a Twitter sentiment
indicator of « Islamic » and « Bitcoin » using the number of
tweets. After retrieving the positive words and the negative
ones we build our twitter measure as TWS:
TWS=
V. EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION
A. Data and methodology
Time-series data have been used to examine the
sentiment-return and the sentiment volatility relationship at
the aggregate market level by considering Bitcoin. To
maintain consistency in our analysis, we computed the
corresponding return and volatility proxies for the Bitcoin.
For instance, Islamic faith sentiment is measured by two
different methods and extracted from different data. We
have then different sources of data described as follow.
Financial data: Our financial data are composed by
Bitcoin prices extracted from the Thomson
Reuters and Datastream database.
Social media data: We collect our social media
data from Twitter API database in order to
measure our corresponding sentimental variable.
This data is a microblogging database which is
grouped from Twitter API from 03/04/2018 to
13/04/2018 in instantaneous frequencies reduced
in daily frequencies by means of moving average
(F. Corea, 2016).
B. Methodology
In this section, we provide a detail discussion on the
methodology used to show the link and effect of our
sentimental variable on the daily returns and volatilities of
the Bitcoin. The obtained measures of Twitter sentiment
(TWM) are averaged in each day. In other words, the daily
Twitter sentiment (TWD) follows this formula:
TWDi
In order to be able to apply the VAR model and Granger
causality tests, we need to verify the stationary of our
variables. ADF test results show that all our variables are
stationary.
In our work we use the vector "VAR" proposed by Sims
(1980) to predict the relationship between sentiment and
returns in a multivariate time series. The VAR model is a
flexible model that allows us to accurately describe the
dynamic behavior of the economic and financial time series,
and can be used as a correct prediction tool.
However, before building a VAR model, we need to check
the stationary of the studied series, which is already done
previously.
Similarly, we need to determine the optimal number of lags
for our VAR.
*Lag length selection:
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
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When running the VAR-models it is important to include
the right lag lenght of the dependent variable as well as the
independent variables. The lag length for the VAR (p) can
be determined using selection criteria model.
The lag length for the VAR (p) model can be determined
using model selection criteria. The basic idea is to fit VAR
(p) models with orders p=0, 1….pmax and choose the
appropriate value of p which minimizes the model selection
criteria (Lütkepohl, 1991).
In our work we use the SC criteria and additional criteria of
Hannan-Quinn information HQ formally stated:
HQC = 2k + -2Lmax log log n
Where: Lmax represents the log likelihood probability data
into a model, k is the number of parameters, n: is the
number of observations.
Using these models, we can identify if the tested variable is
persistent, and if its value in the past still weighing on
today's values; and therefore the integration time offsets is
necessary and obvious. According to the FPE "Final
prediction error", the number of significant lags to use is 5
lags, while LR, Hannan-Quinn information criteria HQIC
and SBIC and AIC “Akaike information criterion”, suggest
eleven lags. In this work we use five lags in order to
simplify the calculations.
* The "Granger"causality test
Granger causality test, proposed in 1969, is a statistical
hypothesis test to determine whether a time series is useful
in forecasting another. Normally, regressions reflect the
"simple" correlations, but Clive Granger argued that the
economy causality could be tested by measuring the ability
to predict future values of time series with past values of
another series time. Since the question of the "real causality"
is deeply philosophical and guess that something before
another can be used as proof of causation, econometricians
argue that the test of Granger believes "predictive
causality".
Hence, if we control the information contained in past Y, we
can say then that X “Granger cause” Y (Datta et al., 2006).
Formally, the possible Granger causal links between stock
and bond outcome (returns and volatility noted by R) and
sentiment (s) is formulated as follow:
Rt Ԑt
C. Empirical Results:
In this section we try to give the results of testing our
hypotheses. Therefore, we use the regression with Newey-
West standard errors in order to avoid any autocorrelation
and heteroscedasticity of the errors. Table 2 provides the
results of this regression. In this table we clearly show that
most of the coefficients of twitter, and google trends
measures statistically significant in their relation with the
return of Bitcoin. These results conduct us to confirm our
first hypothesis. The second part of this table shows that
sentimental proxies are statistically significant. This result
confirms our second hypothesis.
TABLE II NEWEY-WEST STANDARD ERRORS
REGRESSION RESULTS
Twitter sentiment
Bitcoin Return 0.3282316
Bitcoin Volatility 0.0329292
When we apply the VAR model, we find that the Twitter
sentiment has a delayed effect on the return and the
volatility of Bitcoin. Table 3 details the results of the VAR
model.
TABLE III VAR MODEL RESULTS
For our last hypothesis, Table 4 expresses the results of
Granger causality test with five lags. In this table 4 most of
the p values are under 5% which show that our sentimental
proxies Granger causes the Bitcoin return and volatility.
TABLE IV GRANGER CAUSALITY RESULTS FOR BITCOIN
CONCLUSION:
The compliance of Bitcoin to Shariah has created great
debate between Muslim people. This work visualizes the
attention and the emotions towards Bitcoin with regard to its
conformity with Sharia law. For this purpose, a measure of
sentiment is constructed based on Twitter and Google
Trends data. Then the top methods are proposed to
investigate whether these sensations and emotions have an
impact on the market sentiment and the price fluctuations.
Bitcoin Twitter sentiment
Bitcoin Return Lag 1 0.0479795
Lag 2 -0.0010292
Lag 3 -0.0957978
Lag 4 -0.1831325***
Lag 5 0.0619689
Bitcoin Volatility Lag 1 1.850196
Lag 2 1.583181
Lag 3 -0.7420697
Lag 4 1.212408
Lag 5 -2.880991***
Granger
causality test
Chi2 Freedom
degree
P value
Twitter
→bitcoin return
7.1305 5 0.211
Twitter→bitcoin
volatility
12.488 5 0.029**
Twitter→bitcoin
return and
volatility
23.511 10 0.009*
EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 8
Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural
language processing modules has been used to assign
emotions and sentiment orientations. The contemporaneous
effect deduced by Newey-west regression, the delayed
influences tested by VAR model, and Granger causality
analysis are used to investigate the hypothesis that the
constructed measure of sentiment has an impact on the
volatility and the returns of Islamic assets.
These metrics prove that this sentimental index has a
significant effect on the Bitcoin variables. Both positive and
negative sentiment are expressed by Twitter users’. Bitcoin
is not totally accepted by Muslim people who seek to satisfy
their religious needs. We let future research to develop new
Islamic cryptocurrencies satisfying Sharia requirements.
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EJIF – European Journal of Islamic Finance Second Special Issue for EJIF Workshop
http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/EJIF ISSN 2421-2172 9