Scientific Bitcoin Institute-Academic Day
The Science of Bitcoin
The workshop marks the public launch of the Scientific Bitcoin Institute (SBI), a research organizationdedicated to the rigorous, multidisciplinary study of Bitcoin as a complex adaptive system.
Rather than approaching Bitcoin through the lens of advocacy, trading, or industry promotion, the Institute treats it as a natural object of scientific inquiry: a global socio-economic and technological system whose growth, adoption, and behavior can be measured, modeled, and understood with the tools of physics, network science, economics, and computer science.
The inaugural event brings together invited researchers and international experts for a focused half-day of talks and discussion, hosted within Lugano’s established Plan B academic ecosystem (City of Lugano,USI, SUPSI, and Franklin University Switzerland).
The program is organized around the study of Bitcoin as a complex adaptive system, with contributions expected from the following areas:
Power-law and scaling models — long-term growth dynamics of price, adoption, and hash rate; Bitcoin’s power-law behavior and its theoretical foundations.
Complex systems and network science — Bitcoin as a self-organizing network; feedback loops between adoption, security, and value; analogies with cities, organisms, and other scaling systems.
Econophysics and monetary economics — statistical properties of Bitcoin markets; Bitcoin in the context of monetary theory and macroeconomics.
Energy and thermodynamics of proof-of-work — mining as an energy-information process; energy markets, grid interaction, and sustainability questions.
Computer science and protocol research — security, cryptography, Layer-2 systems, and the evolution of the protocol.
Data science and methodology — on-chain analytics, reproducible datasets, and statistical rigor in Bitcoin research.
Societal and adoption dynamics — sociotechnical perspectives on global adoption, including education and policy implications.