Research foundations

Referenced paper

Hasan Selçuk Kılıç and Nail Akar. Capital Costs Protect the Network: Mining Gap Dynamics in Proof-of-Work Blockchains Under a Stochastic Mempool. arXiv:2610.22451v1, submitted 15 October 2026.

The paper studies delayed mining while transaction fees accumulate. Its model combines a two-tier fee market and stochastic backlog with Bitcoin’s difficulty-adjustment setting. Under its assumptions, capital costs constrain equilibrium hashpower and limit the mining gap. This is a conditional theoretical finding, not a claim that any particular rental is profitable.

Oreloom research questions

Oreloom’s proposed research program uses the paper as a starting point for questions, not as a ready-made decision engine.

• How should owned-equipment capital costs and rented-hashpower commitments be represented separately?
• How sensitive are modeled outcomes to fees, subsidy, difficulty, and delivery interruptions?
• Can observed idle time be attributed to an economic mining gap, rather than downtime or missing telemetry?
• Which model outputs remain useful once uncertainty and operational constraints are included?

Validation before Zcash use

The model’s Bitcoin setting and homogeneous operating-cost baseline need re-examination before a Zcash application. Oreloom has not validated the paper’s conclusions for Zcash.

A Zcash adaptation would need network-specific consensus and reward rules, observed transaction-fee behavior, pool arrangements, equipment units, and rental constraints.

Research-to-production gates

• Document the paper version, equations used, assumptions, units, and deviations.
• Construct reproducible datasets with timestamps and source-quality checks.
• Validate the Zcash adaptation against historical records and separate holdout periods.
• Publish sensitivity results, errors, known limitations, and conditions where the model should abstain.
• Keep any future execution workflow subject to explicit budgets, authorization, monitoring, and receipts.