Abstract

Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level, which has motivated a large body of work, yet many open problems still exist and current systems rarely deal with incentive related problems well. This issue arises due to the gap between Cryptography and Distributed Systems security, which deals with traditional security problems that ignore the explicit consideration of incentives, and Game Theory, which deals best with situations involving incentives. With this work, we offer a systematization of the work that relates to this problem, considering papers that blend Game Theory with Cryptography or Distributed systems. This gives an overview of the available tools, and we look at their (potential) use in practice, in the context of existing blockchain based systems that have been proposed or implemented.