Opinion
The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrencies
— July 29, 2020

By Hanna Halaburda, Guillaume Haeringer, Neil Gandal, Joshua Gans
By Hanna Halaburda, Guillaume Haeringer, Neil Gandal, Joshua Gans
While macroeconomists look to it as a potential study of monetary theory, microeconomists have been interested in Bitcoin due to the seemingly robust nature of an otherwise highly decentralized network without any clear owner.
Bitcoin was initially proposed in a white paper by Nakamoto (2008) and came into existence on 3 January 2009. Nakamoto’s contribution was providing the answer to a long-standing question in the cryptography community (and to a lesser extent among libertarians) which is the question of whether it is possible to design a fully decentralized digital currency.
Read the full Vox EU article.
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Hanna Halaburda is Associate Professor of Technology, Operations and Statistics.