The St. Louis Federal Reserve is hosting a blockchain research event on August 10th. A couple interesting papers being presented:
-
Monopoly without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System (Jacob Leshno, Gur Huberman, Ciamac C. Moallemi) - Treats the transaction pool as a congested queuing game with bribery. Relates to the recent discussion of implementing a second price auction. In short, bribery can be effective in some cases, however, their analysis only considers a Bitcoin system with no mandatory tx fees and thus requires some reinterpretation for Ethereum given the necessity of gas.
-
Currency Stability Using Blockchain Technology (Ariel Zetlin-Jones, Bryan Routledge) - Presenter is an advisor to Sweetbridge and has some previous experience working for a Fed branch.
All in all it’s exciting to see academic researchers (including the Federal Reserve) starting to contribute to the ideas in this space. If you can attend the event it may be a good opportunity to collaborate!
p.s. I’m not at affiliated with the event in any capacity, although I will be attending.