This thesis examines Bitcoin related discussions on Bitcointalk.com over the 2013-2022 period. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm, we discover eight distinct topics: Mining, Regulation, Investment/trading, Public perception, Bitcoin’s nature, Wallet, Payment, and Other. Importantly, we find differences in relations between different topics’ sentiment, disagreement (proxy for uncertainty) and hype (proxy for attention) on one hand and Bitcoin return and trading volume on the other hand. Specifically, among all topics, only the sentiment and disagreement of Investment/trading topic have significant contemporaneous relation with Bitcoin return. In addition, sentiment and disagreement of several topics, such as Mining and Wallet, show significant relationships with Bitcoin return only on the tails of the return distribution (bullish and bearish markets). In contrast, sentiment, disagreement, and hype of each topic show significant relation with Bitcoin volume across the entire distribution. In addition, whereas hype has a positive relation with trading volume in a low-volume market, this relation becomes negative in a high-volume market
