A Survey on Applications of Game Theory in Blockchain

TL;DR

This survey reviews how game theory models are applied to address security, management, economic, and energy issues in blockchain networks, highlighting challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of game theoretical approaches in blockchain, covering various issues and analyzing their advantages and disadvantages.

Findings

Game theory models help address security and management issues in blockchain.

Analysis of advantages and disadvantages of different game models.

Identification of future challenges and research directions in the field.

Abstract

In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and tamperproof transaction data ledger. Nowadays, blockchain as the key framework in the decentralized public data-ledger, has been applied to a wide range of scenarios far beyond crypto-currencies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, and insurance. This survey aims to fill the gap between the large number of studies on blockchain network, 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 paper, we review game models proposed to address common issues in the blockchain network. The issues include security issues, e.g., selfish mining, majority attack and Denial of Service (DoS) attack, issues regard 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 advantages and disadvantages of these selected game 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.