Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools

Lin Cong, Zhiguo He () and Jiasun Li

No 25592, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for permissionless blockchains: Each individual miner's cross-pool diversification and endogenous fees charged by pools generally sustain decentralization, because larger pools better internalize their externality on global hash rates, charge higher fees, attract disproportionately fewer miners, and thus grow more slowly. Instead, mining pools as a financial innovation escalate the arms race among competing miners and thus significantly increase the energy consumption of proof-of-work-based consensus mechanisms. Empirical evidence from Bitcoin mining supports our model predictions. The economic insights inform many other blockchain protocols as well as the industrial organization of mainstream sectors with similar characteristics but ambiguous prior findings.

JEL-codes: D43 G2 G22 L13 L44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
Note: AP CF IO LE ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published as Lin William Cong & Zhiguo He & Jiasun Li & Wei Jiang, 2021. "Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools," The Review of Financial Studies, vol 34(3), pages 1191-1235.

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