Blockchain Mining Games

Elias Koutsoupias will be discussing some game-theoretic issues of the participants (miners) in the bitcoin protocol. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are paid when they create a node (mine a block) which will end up in the path of the tree that is adopted by all. He will discuss some aspects of the stochastic game that underlies the strategic considerations of the miners on how to extend this tree, as well as general game-theoretic computational issues of cryptocurrencies.