IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/14154.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

More (or Less) Economic Limits of the Blockchain

Author

Listed:
  • Gandal, Neil
  • Gans, Joshua

Abstract

This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated that an economically sustainable network will involve the same cost regardless of whether it is proof of work or proof of stake although in the later the cost will take the form of illiquid financial resources. In addition, it is shown that regulating the number of nodes (as in a permissioned network) does not lead to additional cost savings that cannot otherwise be achieved via a setting of block rewards in a permissionless (i.e., free entry) network. This suggests that permissioned networks will not be able to economize on costs relative to permissionless networks.

Suggested Citation

  • Gandal, Neil & Gans, Joshua, 2019. "More (or Less) Economic Limits of the Blockchain," CEPR Discussion Papers 14154, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14154
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP14154
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bruno Biais & Christophe Bisière & Matthieu Bouvard & Catherine Casamatta, 2019. "The Blockchain Folk Theorem," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1662-1715.
    2. June Ma & Joshua S. Gans & Rabee Tourky, 2018. "Market Structure in Bitcoin Mining," NBER Working Papers 24242, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Eric Budish, 2018. "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain," NBER Working Papers 24717, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hanna Halaburda & Guillaume Haeringer & Joshua Gans & Neil Gandal, 2022. "The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrencies," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 971-1013, September.
    2. David Cerezo S'anchez, 2021. "Pravuil: Global Consensus for a United World," Papers 2105.10464, arXiv.org.
    3. Rodney J. Garratt & Maarten R. C. van Oordt, 2023. "Why Fixed Costs Matter for Proof-of-Work–Based Cryptocurrencies," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(11), pages 6482-6507, November.
    4. David Cerezo Sánchez, 2022. "Pravuil: Global Consensus for a United World," FinTech, MDPI, vol. 1(4), pages 1-20, October.
    5. Yun Kuen Cheung & Stefanos Leonardos & Georgios Piliouras & Shyam Sridhar, 2021. "From Griefing to Stability in Blockchain Mining Economies," Papers 2106.12332, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hanna Halaburda & Guillaume Haeringer & Joshua Gans & Neil Gandal, 2022. "The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrencies," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 971-1013, September.
    2. Lin William Cong & Zhiguo He & Jiasun Li & Wei Jiang, 2021. "Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools [Concentrating on the fall of the labor share]," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(3), pages 1191-1235.
    3. Brunnermeier, Markus & Abadi, Joseph, 2018. "Blockchain Economics," CEPR Discussion Papers 13420, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Ferreira, Daniel & Li, Jin & Nikolowa, Radoslawa, 2019. "Corporate Capture of Blockchain Governance," CEPR Discussion Papers 13493, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Jens Gudmundsson & Jens Leth Hougaard, 2020. "Enabling reciprocity through blockchain design," IFRO Working Paper 2020/14, University of Copenhagen, Department of Food and Resource Economics, revised 09 Feb 2021.
    6. Soria, Jorge & Moya, Jorge & Mohazab, Amin, 2023. "Optimal mining in proof-of-work blockchain protocols," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 53(C).
    7. Joshua S. Gans & Hanna Halaburda, 2023. ""Zero Cost'' Majority Attacks on Permissionless Blockchains," NBER Working Papers 31473, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Saketh Aleti & Bruce Mizrach, 2021. "Bitcoin spot and futures market microstructure," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(2), pages 194-225, February.
    9. Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong, 2020. "A Model of Cryptocurrencies," NBER Working Papers 26816, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong, 2023. "Decentralization through Tokenization," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 78(1), pages 247-299, February.
    11. Pavel Ciaian & d'Artis Kancs & Miroslava Rajcaniova, 2021. "Interdependencies between Mining Costs, Mining Rewards and Blockchain Security," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 22(1), pages 25-62, May.
    12. Julien Prat & Benjamin Walter, 2021. "An Equilibrium Model of the Market for Bitcoin Mining," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 129(8), pages 2415-2452.
    13. Makarov, Igor & Schoar, Antoinette, 2021. "Blockchain analysis of the Bitcoin market," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118897, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Li Guo & Wolfgang Karl Hardle & Yubo Tao, 2018. "A Time-Varying Network for Cryptocurrencies," Papers 1802.03708, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2022.
    15. Zahra Ebrahimi & Ariel Zetlin-Jones & Bryan Routledge, 2019. "Settlement and Blockchain Equilibria," 2019 Meeting Papers 650, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    16. Raphael Auer, 2019. "Embedded supervision: how to build regulation into blockchain finance," BIS Working Papers 811, Bank for International Settlements.
    17. Nikhil Malik & Manmohan Aseri & Param Vir Singh & Kannan Srinivasan, 2022. "Why Bitcoin Will Fail to Scale?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(10), pages 7323-7349, October.
    18. Michael Sockin & Wei Xiong, 2021. "A Model of Cryptocurrencies," Working Papers 2021-67, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    19. Podhorsky, Andrea, 2023. "Taxing bitcoin: Incentivizing the difficulty adjustment mechanism to reduce electricity usage," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    20. Zhang, Zhiming & Ren, Da & Lan, Yanfei & Yang, Shanxue, 2022. "Price competition and blockchain adoption in retailing markets," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 300(2), pages 647-660.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Blockchain; Proof-of-work; Proof-of-stake;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D00 - Microeconomics - - General - - - General
    • E50 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - General
    • L10 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14154. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.