IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/4137.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Economic Model of Consensus on Distributed Ledgers

Author

Listed:
  • Halaburda, Hanna

    (New York U)

  • He, Zhiguo

    (U of Chicago)

  • Li, Jiasun

    (George Mason U)

Abstract

The designs of many new blockchains are inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume most system nodes behave honestly, we recognize that blockchains are deployed in environments where nodes are subject to strategic incentives. This paper thus develops an economic framework for analyzing distributed consensus formation with explicit incentive considerations. We formalize the consensus formation process in a dynamic game with imperfect information and preplay communication where non-Byzantine nodes are Knightian uncertain about Byzantine actions, and characterize all of its symmetric equilibria. Our findings enrich those from traditional BFT algorithms, offer guidance for designing blockchains in trustless environments, and also provide a theoretical framework bridging distributed consensus and game theoretical modeling.

Suggested Citation

  • Halaburda, Hanna & He, Zhiguo & Li, Jiasun, 2023. "An Economic Model of Consensus on Distributed Ledgers," Research Papers 4137, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:4137
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/economic-model-consensus-distributed-ledgers
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joshua S. Gans & Hanna Halaburda, 2023. ""Zero Cost'' Majority Attacks on Permissionless Blockchains," NBER Working Papers 31473, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Joshua S. Gans, 2024. "Cryptic Regulation of Crypto-Tokens," Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(1), pages 139-163.
    3. Joshua S. Gans & Richard T. Holden, 2022. "Mechanism Design Approaches to Blockchain Consensus," NBER Working Papers 30189, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Luyao Zhang & Xinyu Tian, 2022. "On Blockchain We Cooperate: An Evolutionary Game Perspective," Papers 2212.05357, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2023.
    5. Jacob D. Leshno & Elaine Shi & Rafael Pass, 2024. "On the Viability of Open-Source Financial Rails: Economic Security of Permissionless Consensus," Papers 2409.08951, arXiv.org.
    6. Igor Makarov & Antoinette Schoar, 2022. "Cryptocurrencies and Decentralised Finance," BIS Working Papers 1061, Bank for International Settlements.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • G29 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Other

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:4137. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.