Frontaler Blick auf das D4 Gebäude.

Brown Bag Seminar - Alfred Lehar

30/06/2020

We are pleased to announce the upcoming Brown Bag seminar on June 30th, 2020.

Given the current situation, we move the Brown Bag Seminars to Microsoft Teams.

The next Brown Bag Seminar is scheduled for Tuesday, June 30th, 2020, 18:00-19:00 via MS Teams. The meeting will open at 17:45 for you to dial in. To join the stream please follow this link.

Our speaker will be Alfred Lehar (University of Calgary).

He will give a talk on "Miner Collusion and the BitCoin Protocol".

Abstract: Bitcoin users can offer fees to miners who record their transactions in the block-chain. We document high variation of bitcoin fees, not only over time, but also within blocks. Further, the block-chain rarely runs at capacity, even though fees tend to be higher when blocks are fuller, so miners appear to be leaving `money on the table.' We present a simple model of price discrimination to explain our results. We note that mining pools facilitate collusive equilibria, and estimate that they have extracted least 200 million USD a year in excess fees by making processing capacity scarce.

Back to overview