Why Fixed Costs Matter for Proof-of-Work Based Cryptocurrencies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Ensuring that the record of Bitcoin transactions is secure uses a lot of computational power. Miners, who supply this power to the Bitcoin network, earn transaction fees and new bitcoins. Ultimately, though, bitcoin miners will earn only fees as the number of new bitcoins slowly declines to zero. As mining rewards wane, some experts say that Bitcoin will become vulnerable to attacks. Will Bitcoin transactions remain secure in the future? Our analysis focuses on the fact that mining some cryptocurrencies requires investment in specialized computing hardware. We look at the impact this fixed cost has on the feasibility of a profitable double-spending attack. We show that specialized hardware gives an added layer of protection to the Bitcoin network. As a result, things look less gloomy for the security of the Bitcoin transaction record. Smaller cryptocurrencies that rely on the same specialized hardware as larger ones may be less protected."
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.156 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.045 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".