Bitcoin: A Natural Oligopoly

Carte~ and Oligopoly Pricing of Nonreplenishable Natural Resources

A Faster Bitcoin Network

Bitcoin is an electronic currency based on a peer-to-peer network for the propagation and verification of the transactions. Nowadays, cashless transactions are becoming increasingly popular and bitcoin could be an established currency for such transactions. Its distributed nature, though, and more specifically the delay overhead in transaction verification, not only makes the use of bitcoin ine...

Bitcoin: A primer;

In this Chicago Fed Letter, I explain the digital currency called bitcoin. The current number of bitcoin units is around 11.8 million; and, unlike physical coins, they are divisible to the eighth decimal place. Bitcoins are traded on various online exchanges for other currencies. At the time of this writing, the average worth of a bitcoin over the previous six months had been a little over $100...

A Theory of Bilateral Oligopoly∗

In horizontal mergers, concentration is often measured with the Hirschmann-Herfindahl Index (HHI). This index yields the price-cost margins in Cournot competition. In many modern merger cases, both buyers and sellers have market power, and indeed, the buyers and sellers may be the same set of firms. In such cases, the HHI is inapplicable. We develop an alternative theory that has similar data r...

A Structural Analysis of Bitcoin

There is no formal framework for describing the core structural concepts of Bitcoin or for attempting a correctness proof of the algorithm. This contribution presents several elements which may serve as building blocks. A distributed model for describing the states enclosed in a Bitcoin network is provided. Concepts for modeling the swarm behavior of Bitcoin are analyzed.