Is blockchain hype, revolutionary, or both? What we need to know

Sarah Oh and Scott Wallsten

Chapter 24 in A Research Agenda for New Institutional Economics, 2018, pp 213-220 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Will blockchain technology revolutionize the economy, or is it mostly hype? Blockchain is a decentralized protocol for creating and running distributed ledgers that makes it possible to track assets, from land to music to intellectual property to tomatoes to bitcoins, cryptographically without a centralized controlling authority. In principle, the technology holds out the promise of a reliable, trustworthy way of recording asset ownership and transfers in countries with corrupt or otherwise inefficient institutions. Even in countries with reliable institutions, blockchain may provide a method of recording transfers that are otherwise not valuable enough to track cost-effectively with traditional mechanisms. The potential economic gains are enormous. Yet, the underlying economic and institutional problems are generally harder to solve than simply putting assets on a blockchain. The last step between humans and machines seems to be blockchain’s weakest link, where error, corruption, rent-seeking, and other incentives can impede economic efficiency. This chapter asks a series of questions about blockchain, implications for institutions and future research. How do we think about gains in economic efficiency from this new technology at the margin? How does the hype for blockchain compare to past new technologies? Is blockchain a response to corruption?

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788112505/9781788112505.00035.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:17960_24

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().