2021 Planning and Organization

Open Games for Crypto(economics)

2021 planning and organization

We imagine that open game theory (and the Open Games ware) can become a valuable tool for cryptoeconomics practitioners, who already apply game theory to distributed systems, especially in the context of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Our initial decision/halting task is to figure out if Open Games can be made suitable for cryptoeconomic mechanism design or mechanism validation

• with what extensions, tools, dev infrastructure
• within what limits, in what contexts
• within what timeframe, within what budget

To manage our time and research risk, we will drive towards a proof-of-concept and are considering splitting the work into two agendas, one extending open games and another applying it to cryptoeconomic mechanism design

Extending Open Games:

0. number of players
1. number of components
2. complexity of components

Other ideas that came up on our Jan 5th call:

• a minimum utility gain (delta) that will lead to a deviation, to find equilibriums in a discrete search
• open question how to deal with repeated interactions (bounded storage/compute players?)

Cryptoeconomic mechanism design with Open Games

0. deposit game abstraction for different games (and gate, censor, and more)
   • find equilibrium deposits for known component equilibrium
1. deposit game with attacker (more sophisticated adversiarial action)
   • attacker has utility from attack success conditions
     • success condition is a function of player component strategies
   • some chance attacker appears, sampled from some population of attackers
   • re-find equilibrium deposits in context of attacker
2. parametrizing to maximize the cost of attack
   • cryptoeconomic security optimization