Discussion paper
DP20141 Mining Shocks, Blockchain Security, and the Value of Bitcoin
We study the implications of Bitcoin's security model for its market valuation. We identify mining shocks by exploiting exogenous variation in mining intensity using a narrative approach in a structural Vector Autoregression. While their impact on transaction speed is short-lived, mining shocks persistently affect trading volumes and market valuations, explaining up to 15 percent of Bitcoin's substantial price variation. Our findings can be rationalized in a theoretical framework where mining shocks affect the likelihood to withstand potential attacks and as such impact investor beliefs about the future state of the network and thus Bitcoin’s usefulness as a means of payment.
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