Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Game Theory, Economics, and Mechanism Design for Blockchains

区块链及其执行数字数据产权的能力，有可能开启互联网的下一个化身和新一波重要应用。与传统的分布式系统（如我们的传统银行系统）不同，现代区块链依赖于合作行为的激励机制。去中心化区块链通常依赖于本地加密货币来激励独立参与者正确运行它们，而传统的分布式系统通常部署在定向和封闭的环境中。因此，迫切需要为区块链和加密货币的经济和激励因素建立严格的基础。项目团队还在开发新的、免费的区块链教育材料，以便让所有人都能更容易地了解这个重要但复杂的话题。该项目有三个研究重点。第一个要点涉及交易费用机制设计（即，如何选择在区块链上包括哪些待处理的交易，以及以什么价格执行）。这里的目标是了解不同交易费用机制的福利和收入近似保证，利用加密原语来克服不可能的结果，并实现对区块生产者卡特尔长期勾结的鲁棒性。第二个推动力追求具有强大博弈论保证的加密协议，重点是对侧合约和博弈论公平多方计算具有弹性的加密机制的设计。最后的主旨是研究如何设计具有理想经济属性的去中心化区块链。这里的具体目标包括确定对中本共识的简单修改，以提高其安全性，制定针对活体（而不是安全性）攻击的经济安全定义，并严格比较工作量证明和权益证明机制提供的经济安全。总之，这些研究重点为区块链和加密货币理论奠定了重要的基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Blockchains, and their capability of enforcing property rights for digital data, have the potential to unlock the next incarnation of the Internet and a new wave of important applications. Modern blockchains rely on incentives for cooperative behavior differently than do classical distributed systems, such as our traditional banking system. Decentralized blockchains usually rely on a native cryptocurrency to motivate independent actors to run them correctly, whereas classical distributed systems are typically deployed in directed and closed environments. There is therefore an urgent need to develop rigorous foundations of the economic and incentive factors in blockchains and cryptocurrencies in general. The project team is also developing new and freely available educational materials on blockchains, in order to make this important but complex topic more accessible to all.The project has three research thrusts. The first thrust concerns transaction fee mechanism design (that is, how to select which pending transactions are included for execution on the blockchain, and at what prices). The goals here are to understand the welfare and revenue approximation guarantees for different transaction fee mechanisms, to leverage cryptographic primitives to overcome impossibility results, and to achieve robustness to long-term collusion by cartels of block producers. The second thrust pursues cryptographic protocols that possess strong game-theoretic guarantees, with a focus on the design of cryptographic mechanisms that are resilient to side contracts and game-theoretically fair multi-party computation. The final thrust investigates how to design decentralized blockchains with desirable economic properties. Specific goals here include determining simple modifications to Nakamoto consensus that improve its security, formulating a definition of economic security against liveness (as opposed to safety) attacks, and rigorously comparing the economic security offered by proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mechanisms. Together, these research thrusts develop significant foundations for a theory of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.