IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedlrv/00098.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is Bitcoin a Waste of Resources?

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen D. Williamson

Abstract

Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen D. Williamson, 2018. "Is Bitcoin a Waste of Resources?," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 100(2), pages 107-115.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:00098
    DOI: 10.20955/r.2018.107-15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2018/04/16/is-bitcoin-a-waste-of-resources.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://doi.org/10.20955/r.2018.107-15
    File Function: https://doi.org/10.20955/r.2018.107-15
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.20955/r.2018.107-15?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ben Fung & Scott Hendry & Warren E. Weber, 2017. "Canadian Bank Notes and Dominion Notes: Lessons for Digital Currencies," Staff Working Papers 17-5, Bank of Canada.
    2. Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2016. "The Curse of Cash," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10798.
    3. Ricardo J Caballero & Emmanuel Farhi, 2018. "The Safety Trap," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(1), pages 223-274.
    4. Aleksander Berentsen & Fabian Schär, 2018. "A Short Introduction to the World of Cryptocurrencies," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 100(1), pages 1-16.
    5. Sean Foley & Jonathan R Karlsen & Tālis J Putniņš, 2019. "Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed through Cryptocurrencies?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1798-1853.
    6. Smith, Vernon L & Suchanek, Gerry L & Williams, Arlington W, 1988. "Bubbles, Crashes, and Endogenous Expectations in Experimental Spot Asset Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1119-1151, September.
    7. George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller, 2010. "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9163.
    8. David Andolfatto, 2018. "Blockchain: What It Is, What It Does, and Why You Probably Don’t Need One," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 100(2).
    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. James Chapman & Carolyn A. Wilkins, 2019. "Crypto ‘Money’: Perspective of a Couple of Canadian Central Bankers," Discussion Papers 2019-1, Bank of Canada.
    2. Feng Dong & Zhiwei Xu & Yu Zhang, 2022. "Bubbly Bitcoin," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 74(3), pages 973-1015, October.
    3. Balcilar, Mehmet & Ozdemir, Huseyin & Agan, Busra, 2022. "Effects of COVID-19 on cryptocurrency and emerging market connectedness: Empirical evidence from quantile, frequency, and lasso networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 604(C).
    4. Sokolov, Konstantin, 2021. "Ransomware activity and blockchain congestion," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 771-782.
    5. Kliber, Agata & Marszałek, Paweł & Musiałkowska, Ida & Świerczyńska, Katarzyna, 2019. "Bitcoin: Safe haven, hedge or diversifier? Perception of bitcoin in the context of a country’s economic situation — A stochastic volatility approach," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 524(C), pages 246-257.
    6. Juan Carlos Henao & Liliana López-Jiménez, 2021. "Disrupción tecnológica, transformación digital y sociedad. Tomo IV, Aires de revolución : nuevos desafíos tecnológicos a las instituciones económicas, financieras y organizacionales de nuestros tiempo," Books, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, number 1283.

    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. Dirk Helbing, 2013. "Economics 2.0: The Natural Step towards A Self-Regulating, Participatory Market Society," Papers 1305.4078, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2013.
    3. Aiste Juskaite & Sigitas Siaudinis & Tomas Reichenbachas, 2019. "CBDC – in a whirlpool of discussion," Bank of Lithuania Occasional Paper Series 29, Bank of Lithuania.
    4. Walter Engert & Ben Fung, 2017. "Central Bank Digital Currency: Motivations and Implications," Discussion Papers 17-16, Bank of Canada.
    5. Charles M. Kahn & Francisco Rivadeneyra & Tsz-Nga Wong, 2018. "Should the Central Bank Issue E-money?," Staff Working Papers 18-58, Bank of Canada.
    6. Lambrecht, Marco & Sofianos, Andis & Xu, Yilong, 2020. "Does mining fuel bubbles? An experimental study on cryptocurrency markets," Working Papers 0690, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    7. Altavilla, Carlo & Burlon, Lorenzo & Giannetti, Mariassunta & Holton, Sarah, 2022. "Is there a zero lower bound? The effects of negative policy rates on banks and firms," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 885-907.
    8. Graf von Luckner, Clemens & Reinhart, Carmen M. & Rogoff, Kenneth, 2023. "Decrypting new age international capital flows," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 104-122.
    9. Hossein Nabilou, 2020. "Testing the waters of the Rubicon: the European Central Bank and central bank digital currencies," Journal of Banking Regulation, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 21(4), pages 299-314, December.
    10. Anastasia Melachrinos & Christian Pfister, 2020. "Stablecoins: A Brave New World?," Working papers 757, Banque de France.
    11. Peter Fratrič & Giovanni Sileno & Sander Klous & Tom Engers, 2022. "Manipulation of the Bitcoin market: an agent-based study," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 8(1), pages 1-29, December.
    12. Zhengyang Bao & Andreas Leibbrandt & ple391, 2019. "Thar she resurges: The case of assets that lack positive fundamental value," Monash Economics Working Papers 12-19, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    13. Barry Eichengreen, 2020. "From Commodity to Fiat and Now to Crypto: What Does History Tell Us?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Bernard Yeung (ed.), DIGITAL CURRENCY ECONOMICS AND POLICY, chapter 4, pages 17-39, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    14. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2013. "Understanding Asset Prices," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2013-1, Nobel Prize Committee.
    15. Aleksander Berentsen & Fabian Schär, 2018. "The Case for Central Bank Electronic Money and the Non-case for Central Bank Cryptocurrencies," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 100(2), pages 97-106.
    16. Andrew Clark & Alexander Mihailov, 2019. "Why private cryptocurrencies cannot serve as international reserves but central bank digital currencies can," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2019-09, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    17. Alastair Berg, 2020. "The Identity, Fungibility and Anonymity of Money," Economic Papers, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 39(2), pages 104-117, June.
    18. Paul Mueller, 2014. "An Austrian view of expectations and business cycles," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 27(2), pages 199-214, June.
    19. Donato Masciandaro, 2018. "Central Bank Digital Cash and Cryptocurrencies: Insights from a New Baumol–Friedman Demand for Money," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 51(4), pages 540-550, December.
    20. Sabiou Inoua, 2023. "News-driven Expectations and Volatility Clustering," Papers 2309.04876, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E50 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - General
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • E59 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Other

    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:fip:fedlrv:00098. 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: Scott St. Louis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbslus.html .

    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.