Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools
研究了中心化矿池如何通过风险分担和费用设定影响区块链的去中心化，发现矿池虽未破坏去中心化，但加剧了算力竞赛和能源消耗，并用比特币数据验证了模型。
Abstract The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for blockchains: because of miners’ cross-pool diversification and pool managers’ endogenous fee setting, larger pools better internalize their externality on global hash rates, charge higher fees, attract disproportionately fewer miners, and grow more slowly. Instead, mining pools as a financial innovation escalate miners’ arms race and significantly increase the energy consumption of proof-of-work-based blockchains. Empirical evidence from Bitcoin mining supports our model’s predictions. The economic insights inform other consensus protocols and the industrial organization of mainstream sectors with similar characteristics but ambiguous prior findings.