نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 گروه حسابداری، دانشکده علوم اداری و اقتصاد، دانشگاه اصفهان، اصفهان، ایران.
2 دانشجوی دکتری، گروه حسابداری، دانشگاه تهران، تهران، ایران.
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
Introduction
Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has experienced tremendous growth in terms of public acceptance as the oldest cryptocurrency. However, transitioning from an experimental digital currency to a mainstream payment network introduced new challenges related to scalability and capacity. This study investigates how bitcoin transaction fees respond to financial and technical factors within the network over different periods of its lifespan. The investigation provides novel insights into the dynamics of a decentralized currency and the maturity of a payment network,
Methodology
Bitcoin blockchain data from 2009 to 2023 is categorized into three distinct periods for analysis: the Initial Period (2009-2014), Speculation Period (2014-2018), and Scalability Challenge Period (2018-2023). Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) modeling has been used to analyze short-term and long-term relationships. The dependent variable is the transaction fee, and the explanatory variables are the bitcoin price, average transaction value, average block size, network difficulty, and transaction volume.
Findings
The results showed that in the Initial Period, in the short-term, the price and the fee of the previous day's price have a significant effect on the transaction fee and in the long-term, the price is also effective on the transaction fee. In the Speculation Period, the transaction volume, the block size and the previous day's fee in the short-term and the network difficulty in the long-term has a significant effect on the transaction fee. During the Scalability Challenge Period, in the short-term, the previous day's transaction fee, the bitcoin price, the average value of transactions in bitcoin, the block size, the network difficulty and the transaction volume, and in the long-term, the network difficulty and the block size have a significant effect on the transaction fee. Also, during the scaling challenge period, the previous day's fee has a high effect on the current day's fee, so that it has created a kind of stickiness that lasts until the end of the period. In general, fees are stabilized over periods by learning the factors influencing them, as the behavior of users and miners around block limits and mining reward incentives are optimized.
During the Initial Period, transaction fees exhibited high volatility due to the nascency of bitcoin and limited usage levels. As the cryptocurrencies increasingly became utilized as a payment mechanism in the Speculation Period, the technical parameters affecting block sizes and processing capacity caused fees more reflective of demand on the network. The emergence of scalability constraints facing the blockchain in the Scalability Challenge Period has led to linking the dynamics of fees to more metrics that act as proxies for the level of activity and network usage.
Conclusion
As bitcoin has become a payment network in the new concept, the fees have been aligned with the demand and motivations of network participants during the scaling challenge period, instead of randomly fluctuating during the Initial Period. The separation of bitcoin network data into three time periods provides a new perspective of how decentralized networks work and the factors affecting the fee market in different periods of network maturity.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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