Working Paper

Blockchain Economics

Abstract: The fundamental problem in digital record-keeping is establishing consensus on an update to a ledger, e.g., a payment. Consensus must be achieved in the presence of faults—situations in which some computers are offline or fail to function appropriately. Traditional centralized record-keeping systems rely on trust in a single entity to achieve consensus. Blockchains decentralize record-keeping, dispensing with the need for trust in a single entity, but some instead build a consensus based on the wasteful expenditure of computational resources (proof-of-work). An ideal method of consensus would be tolerant to faults, avoid the waste of computational resources, and be capable of implementing all individually rational transfers of value among agents. We prove a Blockchain Trilemma: any method of consensus, be it centralized or decentralized, must give up (i) fault-tolerance, (ii) resource-efficiency, or (iii) full transferability.

Keywords: Blockchain; Consensus; Cryptocurrency; Mechanism Design; Payments; FinTech;

JEL Classification: D80; E42; G00;

https://doi.org/10.21799/frbp.wp.2022.15

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2022-05-03

Number: 22-15