Blockchain Competition Between Miners: A Game Theoretic Perspective
Journal article, 2020

We model the competition over mining resources and over several cryptocurrencies as a non-cooperative game. Leveraging results about congestion games, we establish conditions for the existence of pure Nash equilibria and provide efficient algorithms for finding such equilibria. We account for multiple system models, varying according to the way that mining resources are allocated and shared and according to the granularity at which mining puzzle complexity is adjusted. When constraints on resources are included, the resulting game is a constrained resource allocation game for which we characterize a normalized Nash equilibrium. Under the proposed models, we provide structural properties of the corresponding types of equilibrium, e.g., establishing conditions under which at most two mining infrastructures will be active or under which no miners will have incentives to mine a given cryptocurrency.

Author

Eitan Altman

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)

Daniel Menasché

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Alexandre Reiffers-Masson

Indian Institute of Science

Mandar Datar

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)

Swapnil Vilas Dhamal

Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)

Corinne Touati

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)

Rachid El-Azouzi

Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon

Frontiers in Blockchain

Vol. 2 26

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Control Engineering

Computer Science

Computer Systems

DOI

10.3389/fbloc.2019.00026

More information

Latest update

9/25/2023