Bitte verwenden Sie diesen Link, um diese Publikation zu zitieren, oder auf sie als Internetquelle zu verweisen: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/222701 
Autor:innen: 
Erscheinungsjahr: 
2019
Schriftenreihe/Nr.: 
ADBI Working Paper Series No. 934
Verlag: 
Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo
Zusammenfassung: 
This paper develops a microeconomic model of bitcoin production to analyze the economic effects of the Bitcoin protocol. I view the bitcoin as a tradable commodity that is produced by miners and whose supply is managed by the protocol. The findings show that bitcoin's volatile price path and inefficiency are related, and that both are a consequence of the protocol's system of supply management. I characterize the fundamental value of a bitcoin and demonstrate that the return on bitcoin appreciates proportionally to the rate of increase in the level of difficulty. In the model, where the price of a bitcoin is based on marginal production costs, successive positive demand shocks result in a rapidly increasing price path that may be mistaken for a bubble. The generalized supremum augmented Dickey-Fuller (GSADF) test is used to demonstrate that the model is able to account for the explosive behavior in the bitcoin price path, providing strong evidence that bitcoin is not a bubble. I also show that the difficulty adjustment mechanism results in social welfare losses from 17 March 2014 to 13 January 2019 of $323.8 million, which is about 9.3% of the miners' total electricity costs during this time period.
Schlagwörter: 
bitcoin
digital coins
Bitcoin protocol
cryptocurrency
bitcoin bubble
JEL: 
F30
G00
G11
Creative-Commons-Lizenz: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Dokumentart: 
Working Paper

Datei(en):
Datei
Größe
3.05 MB





Publikationen in EconStor sind urheberrechtlich geschützt.