{"title":"Redesigning Bitcoin’s Fee Market","authors":"R. Lavi, Or Sattath, Aviv Zohar","doi":"10.1145/3530799","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin’s challenges are (i) securing sufficient miner revenues as block rewards decrease, and (ii) alleviating the throughput limitation due to a small maximal block size cap. These issues are strongly related as increasing the maximal block size may decrease revenue due to Bitcoin’s pay-your-bid approach. To decouple them, we analyze the “monopolistic auction” [16], showing (i) its revenue does not decrease as the maximal block size increases, (ii) it is resilient to an untrusted auctioneer (the miner), and (iii) simplicity for transaction issuers (bidders), as the average gain from strategic bid shading (relative to bidding one’s value) diminishes as the number of bids increases.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2017-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"61","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3530799","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 61
Abstract
The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin’s challenges are (i) securing sufficient miner revenues as block rewards decrease, and (ii) alleviating the throughput limitation due to a small maximal block size cap. These issues are strongly related as increasing the maximal block size may decrease revenue due to Bitcoin’s pay-your-bid approach. To decouple them, we analyze the “monopolistic auction” [16], showing (i) its revenue does not decrease as the maximal block size increases, (ii) it is resilient to an untrusted auctioneer (the miner), and (iii) simplicity for transaction issuers (bidders), as the average gain from strategic bid shading (relative to bidding one’s value) diminishes as the number of bids increases.
期刊介绍:
The ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation welcomes submissions of the highest quality that concern the intersection of computer science and economics. Of interest to the journal is any topic relevant to both economists and computer scientists, including but not limited to the following: Agents in networks Algorithmic game theory Computation of equilibria Computational social choice Cost of strategic behavior and cost of decentralization ("price of anarchy") Design and analysis of electronic markets Economics of computational advertising Electronic commerce Learning in games and markets Mechanism design Paid search auctions Privacy Recommendation / reputation / trust systems Systems resilient against malicious agents.