There's the famous paper "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain" [0, 1] answering this question. Bottom line: huge.
> Nakamoto’s novel form of trust faces serious economic limits. It is unusually expensive in absolute terms relative to the stakes involved, and its expense scales linearly with the stakes involved. [...] if permissionless consensus in its pure form were to become a more important part of the global economic and financial system than it has been to date, then the costs of securing the trust would become preposterous — more than all of global GDP in some
scenarios.
David Rosenthal has good introductory posts on this [2] in his excellent blog.
There's the famous paper "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain" [0, 1] answering this question. Bottom line: huge.
> Nakamoto’s novel form of trust faces serious economic limits. It is unusually expensive in absolute terms relative to the stakes involved, and its expense scales linearly with the stakes involved. [...] if permissionless consensus in its pure form were to become a more important part of the global economic and financial system than it has been to date, then the costs of securing the trust would become preposterous — more than all of global GDP in some scenarios.
David Rosenthal has good introductory posts on this [2] in his excellent blog.
[0] Original 2018 version: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24717
[1] Updated 2024 version [pdf]: https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2024...
[2] https://blog.dshr.org/2025/05/who-is-mining-bitcoin.html
https://blog.dshr.org/2018/06/cryptocurrencies-have-limits.h...
https://blog.dshr.org/2019/02/the-economics-of-bitcoin-trans...
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/fee-only-bitcoin.html