The price and cost of bitcoin

Explaining changes in bitcoin's price and predicting its future have been the foci of many research studies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the relationship between bitcoin's mining costs and its price. One popular notion is the cost of bitcoin creation provides a support...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gordon, S.R (Author), Marthinsen, J.E (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V. 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
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001 10.1016-j.qref.2022.04.003
008 220706s2022 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 10629769 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a The price and cost of bitcoin 
260 0 |b Elsevier B.V.  |c 2022 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qref.2022.04.003 
520 3 |a Explaining changes in bitcoin's price and predicting its future have been the foci of many research studies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the relationship between bitcoin's mining costs and its price. One popular notion is the cost of bitcoin creation provides a support level below which this cryptocurrency's price should never fall because if it did, mining would become unprofitable and threaten the maintenance of bitcoin's public ledger. Other research has used mining costs to explain or forecast bitcoin's price movements. Competing econometric analyses have debunked this idea, showing that changes in mining costs follow changes in bitcoin's price rather than preceding them, but the reason for this behavior remains unexplained in these analyses. This research aims to employ economic theory to explain why econometric studies have failed to predict bitcoin prices and why mining costs follow movements in bitcoin prices rather than precede them. We do so by explaining the chain of causality connecting a bitcoin's price to its mining costs. © 2022 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 
650 0 4 |a Bitcoin 
650 0 4 |a Causation 
650 0 4 |a Mining costs 
650 0 4 |a Price 
650 0 4 |a Value 
700 1 |a Gordon, S.R.  |e author 
700 1 |a Marthinsen, J.E.  |e author 
773 |t Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance