BITCOIN NARRATIVE INTELLIGENCE - STUDY I
The Identity Shift: From "Currency" to "Asset"
Tracing Bitcoin's reclassification in the language of regulated finance. A corpus linguistics analysis of >17,000 SEC filings (2013-2025)
Key finding
In 2016, "currency" appeared 20 times per 1,000 bitcoin mentions in SEC filings; "asset" appeared 30. By 2025, "asset" had risen to 79 while "currency" had fallen to 4. The crossover becomes permanent in mid-2019, before MicroStrategy's treasury pivot, before Tesla's 10-K disclosure, and years before the spot ETF approval. Even excluding ETF and mining filers, "asset" overtakes "currency" by 2017. The language shift preceded the institutional shift, not the other way around.
Methodology
Corpus: >17,000 SEC filings containing "bitcoin" (228M+ words, Jul 2013-Dec 2025; 10-K, 10-Q, S-1, 8-K, and related forms). Collocation analysis: lemmatized terms (asset/assets, currency/currencies, commodity/commodities) within a ±5-word window of each "bitcoin" mention. Metric: collocations per 1,000 bitcoin mentions, smoothed by 3-month rolling average weighted by document mention count. Note: early months (2013-2015) have significantly fewer filings; spikes in that period reflect thin data, not structural shifts. Reference statistics use 2016 as baseline (40,000+ mentions). Robustness: finding confirmed stable across window sizes 3, 5, and 7, and with and without lemmatization. The crossover year and direction of the shift are identical in all variants; only the absolute rates change. Work in progress. Full study includes actor decomposition, form-type stratification (8-K vs. S-1 vs. 10-K), and collocation significance testing (log-likelihood, MI).