# IEEE / University of Berlin (2016) ###### tags: `PoW`, `economy`, `axel` ## Summary Approximately every 4 years, the Bitcoin block reward his halved. When this happens, we can notice a dip in the mining difficulty, as a portion of miners leave. This leads us to believe that reducing block rewards over time to prevent inflation is actually a self-destructive property of Bitcoin. Implementing rewards based on coin age through proof-of-stake could be the solution. In this scenario PoS would not be opposed to PoW but combined to it in order to add healthy incentives to Bitcoin. In addtion, encouraging activity in PoS blockchains is essential since a coin-hoarding paradigm makes the coin more like collectible units of value than like tradable units of currency. ## Comments Serious and detailed paper addressing many aspects of Bitcoin as well as many protocols' properties and how they differ from proof-of-work. There are many references to actual cryptocurrencies and the paper relies on a broad bibliography. It was published by the IEEE and has been cited over 300 times.