1/ NBER paper about tension between PoW cryptocurrency market cap and mining rewards: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/Economic-Limits-Blockchain.pdf …. Essentially, the value of a 51% attack is the subset of the market cap that can be quickly extracted to an anonymous form via modifying new tx. Cost...
3/ currently $106B. So, cost > reward, not a problem. But the gain is a stock measure (market cap), while the cost is a flow measure (mining rewards). The cost increases only linearly with hashrate, and decreases over time w/ block reward halvings. Gain increases w/ market cap.
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4/ This creates an economic limit on the value of a PoW blockchain relative to its mining rewards. Should this value be exceeded, it becomes profitable to create miners and take over the chain. The paper lays out additional criteria and their effects in more detail.
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5/ Conclusion: "The anonymous, decentralized trust enabled by the Nakamoto blockchain, while ingenious, is expensive. Equation (3) says that for trust to be meaningful requires the flow cost of running the blockchain is large relative to the one-shot value of attacking it."
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