ResearchExhibit S-01Conference paper4 Jun 2015#
Polasik et al. (2015)
Price Fluctuations and the Use of Bitcoin: An Empirical Inquiry
As mining profits fall, it is expected that they will be replaced by transaction fees paid by users of the system (Nakamoto, 2008)Read the whole passage
The awards provide an incentive designed to support the early stage of the development of the system. As mining profits fall, it is expected that they will be replaced by transaction fees paid by users of the system (Nakamoto, 2008)
ECB-hosted, not ECB-authored: the ECB hosted the 2015 retail-payments conference; it did not write or endorse the paper. The sentence reports the design expectation, which the authors attribute to Nakamoto (2008) — a premise, not a finding.
ResearchExhibit S-02Peer-reviewed24 Oct 2016#
Carlsten, Kalodner, Weinberg & Narayanan (2016)
On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward
There has been an implicit belief that whether miners are paid by block rewards or transaction fees does not affect the security of the block chain. We show that this is not the case.
A model of the fees-only regime the subsidy schedule ends in — not a measurement of today's network. This sentence is quoted from the ACM Digital Library abstract page (archived copy), because the PDF merges the letters of one word.
ResearchExhibit S-03Working paper1 Jun 2018#
Budish (2018; QJE 2025)
The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
Together, these two equations imply that (3) the recurring, “flow”, payments to miners for running the blockchain must be large relative to the one-off, “stock”, benefits of attacking it. This is very expensive!
NBER working paper 2018; published QJE 2025 (retitled, paywalled, not quoted). Budish names a constraint — the intrinsic cost of proof-of-work security. He does not endorse any fix, and nothing on this page suggests he does.
ResearchExhibit S-04Peer-reviewed15 Oct 2018#
Tsabary & Eyal (2018)
The Gap Game
Our analysis confirms Carlsten et al.'s postulate; indeed, we show that gaps form well before fees are the only incentive, and analyze the implications on security.
Quoted from the arXiv abstract page (the authors' version); published at ACM CCS '18, whose copy could not be fetched. “Gaps” are periods when miners stop mining because fees do not cover costs. A model result, not an observation of today's network.
ResearchExhibit S-05Working paper21 Jan 2019#
Auer (2019)
Beyond the doomsday economics of "proof-of-work" in cryptocurrencies
Second, the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of "mining" income via fees as users free-ride on the fees of other transactions in a block and in the subsequent blockchain.
A BIS working paper: the author's views, not the BIS's. Quoted from the BIS abstract page. Auer's own remedy is to depart from proof-of-work — it is quoted in full below, so the paper is not read as backing any proof-of-work fix.
ResearchExhibit S-06Peer-reviewed1 Nov 2022#
Chiu & Koeppl (2022)
The economics of cryptocurrency: Bitcoin and beyond
We find that it is optimal to use seignorage rather than transaction fees to finance costly mining.
Their model favours seigniorage: it finds it optimal to pay for mining with new issuance rather than fees (“seignorage” is the paper's spelling). A normative model result — the case for issuance that never ends — not a finding that fees will fail. Bitcoin's schedule takes issuance to zero; that is a fact about the schedule, not about the paper.
ResearchExhibit S-07Working paper1 Jul 2023#
Gans & Halaburda (2023)
"Zero Cost" Majority Attacks on Permissionless Blockchains
We demonstrate that a majority attacker can successfully attack with a negative cost, which shows that the protocol mechanisms are insufficient to create a secure network, and emphasizes the importance of socially driven mechanisms external to the protocol.
Cuts both ways. If an attack can cost less than nothing, the size of the security budget alone does not decide security — which weakens “the budget is too small” as much as “the budget is enough”. NBER working paper, not peer-reviewed.
ResearchExhibit S-08Preprint3 Jun 2026#
Lee
Bitcoin After Block Rewards
As block rewards diminish, the risk arises that miners may withdraw hashing power, thereby reducing the cost of attacks and threatening the network’s long-term security.
arXiv preprint, June 2026, of a master's thesis (Texas A&M University); not peer-reviewed. Its finding that miner incentives turn fragile is for a hypothetical fee-only regime, with the block reward removed entirely — and on data around the 2024 halving it finds no large-scale or structural deviation from honest mining. The fixes it evaluates are changes to Bitcoin's own fee rules (a base fee, a fee floor, an adaptive block size); nothing on this page suggests it endorses any other.
ResearchExhibit S-09Working paper13 Jul 2026#
Schär, Thürkauf & Yermack
Unruly by Design: Fee Volatility and Strategic Attacks in Bitcoin Mining
These patterns imply potential destabilization of the Bitcoin blockchain as future mining rewards become more volatile due to gradual withdrawal of fixed block subsidies.
NBER working paper, July 2026; not peer-reviewed. The authors present it as the first empirical evidence linking attacks on the blockchain to swings in fees: in 2017–2025 block data, competing blocks become more frequent as the fee gap between adjacent blocks widens. They find the effect modest today — the subsidy is the buffer — and call their projections out of sample. They propose no fix, and nothing on this page suggests they endorse one.
ResearchExhibit S-10Research report13 Oct 2026#
CCAF and Fii
Funding Bitcoin's Future: Paying for Security as the Block Subsidy Fades
This assumption, that fee revenue would naturally grow to replace declining subsidies, has not been tested at scale.
A research report, not a journal paper: the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (Cambridge Judge Business School) with Fii, October 2026. Named outside reviewers read it, and the report says their thanks imply no endorsement; it is not peer-reviewed. It sets out the options under debate and their trade-offs, and it never mentions NAT. Its merged-mining line is quoted below only together with the caveat from the same page.
