The consensus equilibria of mining gap games related to the stability of Blockchain Ecosystems

Abstract

The equity and currency tokens are typically two kinds of initial coin offerings (ICOs) like Bitcoin or Ethereum based on the platform of Blockchains to provide a particular product or service, it is very important to study the mechanism of Blockchain Ecosystems. The goal of this paper is to explain the stable in the sense for the existence of consensus equilibria for mining gap games by using one new concept called ‘consensus games (CG)’ under the framework of Blockchain Ecosystems which mainly mean the economic activities by taking into the account of three types of different factors which are expenses, reward mechanism and mining power for the work on blockschain by applying consensuses including the ‘Proof of Work’ due to Nakamoto in 2008 as a special case.

Keywords:

• ICOs
• consensus equilibrium
• Blockchain Ecosystems
• mining gap games
• longest chain rules (LCRs)
• stability

Acknowledgments

We thank both anonymous referees and associate editor for their comments and deep insight which led us to have the current version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under [grant number $\mathrm{\#}$U1811462] and   [grant number $\mathrm{\#}$11501349].