# kaal:position:2026-08-08-347

**Affirmed position.** 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.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**Holds when.**

- 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.

**Current debate.** Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae033

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7261481-012: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7261481-012

**Scholarly basis.** 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 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

**Mapping confidence.** 0.99  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** economics, risk-and-incentives, scholarly-growth-coverage, scholarly-literature, blockchain, permissionless-consensus, proof-of-stake, trust-support, institutional-design

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-13:scholarly-growth-7261481-012-reviewed-v1 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/by-claim/7261481-012.html.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.