Year | 2018 |
---|---|
Author | Percy Venegas |
Link | View Research Paper |
Categories |
Bitcoin / Cryptocurrencies / Technical |
We demonstrate that attention flows manifest knowledge, and the distance (similarity) between cryptoeconomies has predictive power to understand whether a fork or fierce competition within the same token space will be a destructive force or not. When dealing with hundreds of currencies and thousands of tokens investors have to face a very practical constraint: attention quickly becomes a scarce resource. To understand the role of attention in trustless markets we use Coase’s theorem. For the theorem to hold, the conditions that the crypto communities that will split should meet are: (i)Well defined property rights: the crypto investor owns his attention; (ii) Information symmetry: it is reasonable to assume that up to the moment of the hard fork market participants are at a level ground in terms of shared knowledge. Specialization (who becomes the expert on each new digital asset) will come later; (iii) Low transaction costs: Just before the chains split there is no significant cost in switching attention. Other factors (such as mining profitability) will play a role after the fact, and any previous conditions (e.g. options sold on the future new assets) are mainly speculative. The condition of symmetry refers to the “common knowledge” available at t-1 where all that people know is the existing asset. Information asymmetries do exist at the micro level -we cannot assume full efficiency because transaction costs are really never zero.