Monopoly Without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of Bitcoin

  • Jacob Leshno | Columbia University

Owned by nobody and controlled by an almost immutable protocol, the Bitcoin payment system is a platform with two main constituencies: users and profit-seeking miners who maintain the system’s infrastructure. The paper seeks to understand the economics of the system: How does the system raise revenue to pay for its infrastructure? How are usage fees determined? How much infrastructure is deployed? What are the implications of changing parameters in the protocol?

Speaker Details

Jacob Leshno is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. He is known for his work on Unbalanced Random Matching Markets, among many other contributions. Before joining Columbia, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. Jacob wrote his PhD at Harvard mentored by Al Roth. See his webpage (opens in new tab) for more.

Series: Microsoft Research Talks