# SoK: Tools for Game Theoretic Models of Security for Cryptocurrencies

## TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews tools combining game theory with cryptography and distributed systems to model incentives in cryptocurrencies, highlighting current challenges and practical applications in blockchain security.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing tools and methods for modeling incentives in cryptocurrencies, bridging cryptography, distributed systems, and game theory.

## Key findings

- Identifies key tools used in game theoretic models of cryptocurrency security
- Highlights gaps and open problems in incentive modeling
- Discusses practical applications in blockchain systems

## 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. Understanding how to incorporate this into the models used to design cryptocurrencies 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 aim to offer a systematization of the work that relates to this problem, considering papers that blend Game Theory with Cryptography or Distributed systems and discussing how they can be related. 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.