Original source found at:
https://community.bus.emory.edu/dept/ISOM/Digital/default.aspx

Student Evaluation of Course(465kb)

This year people around the world are discussing about the future of digital currencies, such as Bitcoin. This spring Goizueta students wrote white paper on different facets of these emerging currencies. Below are the eight of the best papers on virtual currencies. The instructor Professor Foster and his students would love to have your feedback at FosterBrahm@gmail.com.

Name	Author	Short Description
A Mysterious Future – Bitcoin in China	Zun Zhu	This paper mainly discusses why the future of Bitcoins in China is hard to predict.
Bitcoin and the Journey Down the Silk Road	Mohamed Selais	Silk Road, a platform of approximately one billion dollars’ worth of illegal transactions, shut down in 2013. The majority of the illegal dealers on the website of Silk Road use Bitcoins for transactions, taking advantage of the anonymity of Bitcoins.
Digital Currencies and Network Externalities	Nicole Reynolds	In this paper, Nicole Reynolds applies an economic concept ‘network effect’ into the market of digital currencies. The more people accepting one digital currency, the more likely this virtual currency is to succeed and functions as a valid currency.
Marc Andressen’s Digital Currency End Game	Jordan Pople	This paper is written by Jordan Pople, the valedictorian of Goizueta Business School of Emory University’14. Pople mainly explores Marc Andreesen’s investment strategies in digital currencies.
M-PESA to Venmo- Digital Ciurrency Exchanges’ Journey from Emerging Markets to Developmed Markets and Beyond	Aaron Shaiman	M-PESA, a mobile payment system, has gained huge success in Kenya as over two-thirds of Kenya’s adult population adopts M-PESA. Also, Venmo, a new kind of digital wallet functioning as a social network, has gained its popularity in many U.S. colleges.
Social Media’s Influence on Bitcoins	Hyde Kwan	By analyzing the data collected from Twitter and the digital wallet website called Coinbase, Hyde Kwan designed a graph, demonstrating the positive correlation between ‘Bitcoin’ Twitter Mentions and the average trading value of Bitcoins.
The Evolution of Currency- How Trust and Loyalty will Change the Way we Think About Money	Cameron Wheeler	Cameron Wheeler puts forward a brilliant idea about the possibility of a world without currency, a world where work and reward are not based on physical possessions or a common currency, but rather on intrinsic motivation and trust.
Venmo	Zeezhan Anwar	This paper is one of the best articles about Venmo. Anwar did a good job in explaining and analyzing Venmo’s business model, its growth potential and its expansion opportunities on the basis of people’s payment behavior.