"Distributed record-keeping with a blockchain based on consensus through PoW is an intriguing concept. The economics of this technology that underlies most cryptocurrencies are driven by the individual incentives to double spend and the costs associated with reining in these incentives. These costs are both private in the form of delayed settlement and social in the form of mining which is a public good. Consequently, a cryptocurrency becomes more efficient as its scale increases. This explains why a cryptocurrency can avoid double spending only when the user pool is sufficiently large, and why a cryptocurrency works best when the volume of transactions is large relative to the individual transaction size" https://www.snb.ch/n/mmr/reference/sem_2019_05_31_koeppl/source/sem_2019_05_31_koeppl.n.pdf