Related papers: A Mean Field Games Model for Cryptocurrency Mining
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
This paper describes a basic model of a gift economy in the shape of a Giving Game and reveals the fundamental structure of such a game. Main result is that the game shows a community effect in that a small subgroup of players eventually…
We study a stochastic game framework with dynamic set of players, for modeling and analyzing their computational investment strategies in distributed computing. Players obtain a certain reward for solving the problem or for providing their…
The arisen of Bitcoin has led to much enthusiasm for blockchain research and block mining, and the extensive existence of mining pools helps its participants (i.e., miners) gain reward more frequently. Recently, the mining pools are proved…
When users access shared resources in a selfish manner, the resulting societal cost and perceived users' cost is often higher than what would result from a centrally coordinated optimal allocation. While several contributions in mechanism…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
In a mean field game of controls, a large population of identical players seek to minimize a cost that depends on the joint distribution of the states of the players and their controls. We first consider the classes of mean field games of…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
We investigate the full dynamics of capital allocation and wealth distribution of heterogeneous agents in a frictional economy during booms and busts using tools from mean-field games. Two groups in our models, namely the expert and the…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
Given a large number of homogeneous players that are distributed across three possible states, we consider the problem in which these players have to control their transition rates, while minimizing a cost. The optimal transition rates are…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…
We present a novel framework for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms by modeling blockchain growth as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) which we reduce to a set of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…