Blockchain mining games

Speaker/Bio

Zhenpeng Shi is a first-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering working with Prof. Starobinski. His current research focuses on the game-theoretic analysis of cloud computing systems.

Abstract

In this talk, I will present the Blockchain Mining Games proposed by Kiayias et al. The authors considered two complete-information stochastic games: (a) the immediate-release game in which every miner releases immediately mined blocks and (b) the strategic-release game in which miners can withhold releasing blocks. Both games are simplified versions of the incomplete-information game that is actually played by miners, but still manage to capture two important questions asked by miners: (a) which block to mine and (b) when to release a mined block. The authors showed that only when the computational power of each miner is relatively small, the miners’ best responses match the expected behavior of the bitcoin designer.

Ref:

• Kiayias, Aggelos, et al. "Blockchain mining games." Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. ACM, 2016.