| Title | : | Strategic Investments in Blockchain Mining: A Stochastic Game Perspective |
| Speaker | : | Swapnil Dhamal (Researcher with Telecom SudParis, France) |
| Details | : | Thu, 14 Sep, 2023 11:00 AM @ SSB 233 |
| Abstract: | : | Blockchain technology has found applications in various fields such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, security services, and Internet of Things. Its functioning relies on a block mining procedure, where miners collect block data consisting of a number of transactions and attempt to solve a computationally-intensive cryptographic hash puzzle in return for a specified reward. In this talk, I will present one of my works on strategic investment of computational power by miners in blockchain. In particular, we shall consider a setting where miners can arrive and depart over time, and hence analyze their investment strategies and the obtained payoffs in the equilibrium of the underlying stochastic game. We shall see that depending on the mining scenario, miners either follow a thresholding policy that is independent of the other miners, or a smooth policy that depends on the other miners. Thereafter, we will look at a Stackelberg game, where the system decides the amount of reward to offer for mining a block and the miners decide how much power to invest based on the offered reward. |
