The Economics of Blockchain Consensus

By Joshua Gans,

Book cover of The Economics of Blockchain Consensus: Exploring the Key Tradeoffs in Blockchain Design

Book description

Blockchain technologies have been rapidly adopted for the creation of cryptocurrencies and have been explored for a myriad of applications. While this is of important economic interest, the computer science behind how blockchains operate to provide security and provenance has been largely inaccessible to economists. This book is a bridge…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Economics of Blockchain Consensus as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Many people have heard of Bitcoin’s “proof of work” (POW) consensus protocol which involves using huge amounts of energy to solve cryptographic problems. Some of us have also heard of “proof of stake”, an alternative to POW now used by the second largest cryptocurrency, Ether. What Joshua’s book taught me was the similarities and linkages between these two different ways of running a blockchain.

By focusing on the economics, not just the technology, of different consensus protocols, we learn about fundamental issues like the “cost of computational trust”, the future of consensus protocols, and indeed the future of cryptocurrencies.

From Richard's list on books about the digital economy.

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