Methods and discussion

Micro case

A practical example of the application of Coase’s Theorem using empirical data

The graph in Figure 1 maps the attention flows from services used by the bitcoin cash and bitcoin communities in the period from 1 month before the hard fork to 1 month after the hard fork. The network clearly shows how audiences interests are sufficiently different to likely support both currencies. The shared space includes common interests (such as wallets that supported both coins). The strength of the links encodes proximity, a measure of affinity between each service and the community — each particular cryptocurrency is a sink, a consumer of attention of the users of a service.
The nodes are vertices of attention, the small ones function as sources and the large ones as sinks. In this example the focus is on the “off-chain” economy, but the same treatment can be applied to on-chain signals.