Qualification: Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-347 · 2026-08-08

Budish gives economic content to Kaal's distinction between internal stake accounting and external resource finance. His zero-profit condition treats trust support as costly work, stake, storage, or memory and makes the quantity supplied a function of protocol compensation. The resulting equilibrium constraint requires recurring payment for trust support to be large relative to the benefits of attack. This supports Kaal's condition that internal accounting alone does not finance external verification resources. It does not establish that Kaal's reference mechanism lacks an external financing channel, measure its infrastructure costs, or extend beyond permissionless consensus.

• The response is limited to the exact QJE evidence passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
• External evidence level: peer-reviewed QJE article with a complete publisher HTML, complete precursor PDF, and concordant Crossref, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar records.
• Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
• The source analyzes permissionless consensus. It does not study Kaal's reference mechanism or its internal accounting rules.
• Budish models compensation, trust-support costs, and security constraints. The article does not prove that any specific system lacks an external financing channel.
• Trust support includes computational work, storage, memory, and stake. The cost differs by protocol and includes opportunity cost for proof of stake.
• The relationship is an economic qualification. It does not measure Kaal's compute, verification, or infrastructure costs.
• The OUP article and PDF endpoints returned HTTP 403 to the direct fetcher. A complete 520,423-byte OUP Silverchair article HTML, the registered abstract, and the author's complete 2018 precursor were reviewed.
• Semantic Scholar broad search and three inherited identity refreshes returned HTTP 429. Those records were withheld rather than promoted.

Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

kaal:claim:7261481-012
Wulf A. Kaal, Computative Economics: A Framework for Economic Analysis under Computational Abundance (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261481
Source PDF sha256: 78c42db521624f7398717732a7fa51a6e3157a5adf02a2e09fbab15e0cf920d9

Evidence: peer-reviewed QJE article with a complete publisher HTML, complete precursor PDF, and concordant Crossref, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar records
Review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.99
Mapping ambiguous: false

economicsrisk-and-incentivesscholarly-growth-coveragescholarly-literatureblockchainpermissionless-consensusproof-of-staketrust-supportinstitutional-design

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-13:scholarly-growth-7261481-012-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Canonical markdown sha256: 1782b9d0c00e153b7901b5ef14021a7ee5920392d2778b7764dd9365e1f95149
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-347.md | sha256sum