Related papers: The Framework of Consensus Equilibria for Mining-P…
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…
In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and tamperproof…
With the development of decentralized consensus protocols, permissionless blockchains have been envisioned as a promising enabler for the general-purpose transaction-driven, autonomous systems. However, most of the prevalent blockchain…
We propose a mean field game model to study the question of how centralization of reward and computational power occur in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Miners compete against each other for mining rewards by increasing their computational…
We consider the problem of a game theorist analyzing a game that uses cryptographic protocols. Ideally, a theorist abstracts protocols as ideal, implementation-independent primitives, letting conclusions in the "ideal world" carry over to…
This paper introduces a structural game-theoretic model to value decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on speculative beliefs, it frames the asset's price within a Rational-Expectations Security-Utility Nash…
It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
This paper has two central aims: first, to provide simple conditions under which the generalized games in choice form and, consequently, the abstract economies, admit equilibrium; second, to study the solvability of several types of systems…
A notion of incentive for agents is introduced which leads to a very general notion of an equilibrium for a finite game. Sufficient conditions for the existence of these equilibria are given. Known existence theorems are shown to be…
Blockchains lie at the heart of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that have shown great promise to revolutionize finance and commerce. Although they are gaining increasing popularity, they face technical challenges when it comes to scaling…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the analysis of reward sharing schemes in mining pools, such as those associated with Bitcoin. The framework is centered around the reported shares in a pool instead of agents and results in…
Blockchain-based smart contracts offer a new take on credible commitment, where players can commit to actions in reaction to actions of others. Such reaction-function games extend on strategic games with players choosing reaction functions…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…