A Survey on Blockchain: A Game Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

Over the past decade, blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchains was originated from the concept of crypto-currencies to serve as a decentralized and tamper-proof transaction data ledger. Nowadays, blockchains as the key framework in the decentralized public data-ledger have been applied to a wide range of scenarios far beyond crypto-currencies, such as the Internet of Things, healthcare, and insurance. This survey aims to fill the gap between a large number of studies on blockchain networks, where game theory emerges as an analytical tool, and the lack of a comprehensive survey on the game theoretical approaches applied in blockchain-related issues. In this survey, we review the game models proposed to address common issues in the blockchain network. The focus is placed on security issues, e.g., selfish mining, majority attack and denial of service attack, issues regarding mining management, e.g., computational power allocation, reward allocation, and pool selection, as well as issues regarding blockchain economic and energy trading. Additionally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these selected game theoretical models and solutions. Finally, we highlight important challenges and future research directions of applying game theoretical approaches to incentive mechanism design and the combination of blockchain with other technologies.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, game theory, mining management, security.The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Junggab Son. recently applied in a wide range of scenarios far beyond crypto-currencies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) [6], healthcare [7] and insurance [8]. In general, blockchain is a distributed public data-ledger maintained by achieving the consensus among a number of nodes in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. More specifically, the verified transaction data is stored in a chain of blocks, i.e., a basic data structure of blockchain, and the chain grows in an append-only manner with all new verified blocks to it. This process involves several operations such as verifying transactions, disseminating blocks, and attaching blocks to the blockchain.As such, the blockchain requires a number of consensus nodes to participate in the network. The rational nodes perform actions or strategies that aim to maximize their

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“…Although relatively secure, the blockchain is still under the risk of multiple kinds of attacks, such as selfish mining attack, majority attack and Denial of Service (DOS) attack [13].…”