Game-theoric approach to decision-making problem for blockchain mining
Abstract
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 problem as a noncooperative game, because the probability of creating a block depends not only on one's own available computational resources, but also those of other miners. Through theoretical and numerical analyses, we show a hysteresis phenomenon of Nash equilibria depending on the reward and a jump phenomenon of miner decisions by a slight change in reward. We also show that the reward for which miners decide not to participate in the mining becomes smaller as the number of miners increases.
- Publication:
-
arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- October 2020
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.2010.05370
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2010.05370
- Bibcode:
- 2020arXiv201005370T
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Computer Science and Game Theory;
- Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
- E-Print:
- 7 pages, 6 figures an extended version of a manuscript accepted to IEEE L-CSS