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Awesome Cryptoeconomics Awesome

A curated list of awesome resources for Cryptoeconomics research

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Table of Contents

Articles

Introductory

“Cryptoeconomics is the application of incentive mechanism design to information security problems.”

  1. ☑️ Cryptoeconomics for dummies
  2. ☑️ Cryptoeconomics 101
    • "Cryptoeconomics is the study of economic interaction in adversarial environments." (Where those environments are decentralised or distributed.)
  3. ☑️ Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics by Josh Stark
    • "Cryptoeconomics is the use of incentives and cryptography to design new kinds of systems, applications, and networks."
    • "Understanding the mechanism design of a project holding an ICO is an essential tool in determining that token’s utility and likely value."
  4. ☑️ What is Cryptoeconomics - A guide by BlockGeeks
    • PoS negates P + epsilon attack. Bribes (epsilon) no longer outweigh punishments.
  5. ☑️ Paving the Future of Blockchain Technology
    • "Using cryptography, the blockchain concept allows us to definitively prove what transactions actually happened in the past. Through game theory and economics incorporated into the design of blockchain protocols, the system incentivizes stability and this common good to hold into the future."
    • PoS is resistant to the P + epsilon attack because the attacker will have to credibly show an enormous budget to subsidize the participants’ security deposits.
  6. ☑️ Vivek Singh's Cryptoeconomics in context
  7. The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics by RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub
  8. ☑️ Cryptoeconomics is Hard Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 by Aleksandr Bulkin
  9. ☑️ How to create a cryptoeconomic protocol from scratch by Vlad Zamfir
  10. ☑️ Behavioural Crypto-Economics: The challenge and promise of Blockchain Incentive Design by Elab Verbin

Labels

Game Theory

"Game Theory is a set of tools used to help analyse situations where an individual's best course of action depends on what others do or are expected to do. Game Theory allows us to undersand how people act in situations where they are interconnected."

"Game theory generally refers to the study of mathematical models that describe the behavior of logical decision-makers (who want to maximise their payoff). A game refers to a situation involving a set of players who each have a set of possible choices, in which the outcome for any individual player depends partially on the choices made by other players."

  1. ☑️ Introduction to Game Theory Part one of a series by Devin Soni
  2. ☑️ Schelling Point Introduction to the concept of Schelling Point
  3. ☑️ Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
    • "A Nash Equilibrium is a set of choices in which no player has anything to gain by changing only their own choice. They are often applied to games in which both players move simultaneously and where decision trees are less useful."
  4. ☑️ Mechanism design (deck) Mechanism design theory examples and complexity
  5. Standford's Algorithmic Game Theory lecture series
  6. ☑️ Cryptocurrency Game Theory What is Cryptocurrency Game Theory: A Basic introduction
  7. ☑️ Correlated Equilibria In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium
  8. ☑️ Wikipedia: Assurance Contract
  9. ☑️ Wikipedia: Vickrey Auction
    • Bids are secret and the winner of the auction (defined as the player with the highest bid) only pays the second highest amount that was bid.
  10. ☑️ Wikipedia: All-Pay Auction
    • An auction in which every bidder must pay regardless of whether they win the prize.

Mechanism Design

"Mechanism Design is often referred to as “reverse game theory” – Game theory is about choosing the best moves in a given game, whereas mechanism design is about creating a game, given the moves you desire."

"Cryptography is the part of your mechanism that ensures the integrity of past moves, and economics is the part of your mechanism that ensures you’ll take the proper future moves."

"Mechanism design is a field of economics dedicated to the study of mechanisms to (dis)/incentivize actions."

"Creating tokens without studying mechanism design is like building new cryptosystems without reading any crypto papers... "

  1. ☑️ A Crash Course in Mechanism Design for Cryptoeconomic Applications
  2. ☑️ Mechanism Theory paper by Matthew O. Jackson
  3. "It's naive to tackle distribute systems and incentive mechanism design separately" - Link

Cryptographic Primitives

  1. ☑️ Cryptographic Primitives as described in Wikipedia
  2. A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup
  3. ☑️ Ethereum: Signing and Validating
  4. ☑️ Merkling in Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin
  5. ☑️ Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree by Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark
  6. ☑️ Commitment Scheme
    • "...allows one to commit to a chosen value (or chosen statement) while keeping it hidden to others, with the ability to reveal the committed value later"

Consensus Mechanisms

PoW - Proof of Work

  1. ☑️ PoW and Blockchains presentation by Prof. Ittay Eyal (IC3)
    • PoW provides Sybil protection
  2. ☑️ The PoW concept article by the Nakamoto Institute
    • Handicap Principle - "The central idea is that sexually selected traits function like conspicuous consumption, signalling the ability to afford to squander a resource. Receivers know that the signal indicates quality because inferior quality signallers cannot afford to produce such wastefully extravagant signals."
  3. ☑️ Vulnerability: Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake
    • PoW has objective consensus protocol. PoS is weakly subjective.

PoS - Proof of Stake

  1. Strengths and Weaknesses of PoS Vitalik Buterin's article on the strengths and weaknesses of staking contrasting to PoW algorithms
  2. PoS Design Philosophy A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy by Vitalik Buterin
  3. Ethereum PoS FAQ
  4. The evolution of PoS Article on the evolution of PoS by Coin Telegraph
  5. Weak Subjectivity in PoS Weak Subjectivity in PoS by Vitalik Buterin
  6. The History of Casper - Chapter 1 Vlad Zamfir's series on the history of Casper, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5
  7. On Stake and Consensus
  8. Critic on the PoS Philosophy by Tuur Demeester
  9. Extended Summary on Casper by Jon Choi
  10. The Economics of the PoS consensus algorithm
  11. Casper vs Tendermint
  12. Minimal Slashing condition in Ethereum

DPoS - Delegated Proof of Stake

  1. DPoS Introduction Introduction to DPoS by Bitshares
  2. DPoS vs PoW Article by Daniel Larimer from Bitshares
  3. Tendermint BFT vs. EOS dPoS by Tendermint
  4. Seeking Consensus on Consensus Delegated Proof of Stake and the Two Generals' Problem

dBFT - Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance

  1. Byzantine Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems by Prof. Kenneth Goodwin
  2. dBFT vs PoW and PoS Antshare's (now NEO) views on consensus
  3. Intro to Ethermint BFT

Network Effects

  1. ☑️ A Note on Metcalfe's Law, Externalities and Ecosystem Splits by Vitalik Buterin
    • Wikipedia: Metcalfe's Law
    • Not N2 except at low numbers. More like N*log(N).
  2. ☑️ How I learned to stop worrying and love ETC
  3. ☑️ Continuous Token Models: Towards a Million Networks of Value by Simon de la Rouviere
    • "Continuous Token Models take a different approach to quantifying interest in networks of value."
    • "The idea is that instead of pre-selling tokens during a launch phase, the tokens are minted as needed through various means. The tokens are then dispensed for services rendered in the network."
    • "However, if you add a global namespace, users can start using this system WITHOUT the permission of Truffle. Users would then be able to immediately start congregating around common focal (schelling) points in the same way people organise around hashtags..."
    • See meme markets.
  4. ☑️ Crypto Tokens: A breakthrough in open network design by Chris Dixon
    • "Token networks remove this friction by aligning network participants to work together toward a common goal— the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token."
  5. ☑️ Bitcoin Network Effects
  6. ☑️ Keepers — Workers that Maintain Blockchain Networks
  7. ☑️ Smart-Contract Network Effect Fallacy
  8. ☑️ On The Network Effects of Stores of Value
  9. ☑️ Power laws and Network Effects: Why BitcoinCash is not a free lunch

Governance

  1. The Consensus Series, Part I: The Basics of Collectivity and Addendum by Aleksandr Bulkin
  2. Governance and Network Effects
  3. Notes on Blockchain Governance by Vitalik Buterin
  4. Against On-Chain Governance by Vlad Zamfir

Cryptoeconomic Security

  1. Intro to Cryptoeconomic security Basic intro to cryptoeconomic security
  2. Anti-fragile Cryptoeconomic systems Anti-fragile cryptoeconomic Systems through game theory
  3. Triangle of harm by Vitalik Buterin
  4. On Inflation, Transaction Fees and Cryptocurrency Monetary Policy Vitalik Buterin's article on the role of cryptoeconomics in blockchain security
  5. Settlement Finality Vitalik Buterin's article on the elusive topic of economic finality
  6. Bancor is flawed Bancor's review by Hacking Distributed
  7. To sink front-runners, send submarines Bancor's front-running woes by Hacking Distributed
  8. Bitcoin's security model by Jameson Lopp

Attacks

  1. General article on how attacks work in PoW - Part 1 and Part 2
  2. Long range attacks
  3. Censorship attacks
  4. P + epsilon attack
  5. Coordination problems
  6. The Miners dilemma
  7. Dealing with failure in cryptocurrency Vlad Zamfir's article on dealing with failure in cryptocurrency
  8. Model of an internal PoW attacker Vlad Zamfir's article on PoW attackers
  9. Cryptoeconomics and X-Risk researchers should listen to each other more Vitalik Buterin's article on how cryptoeconomics and existential risk researchers could apply blockchain technology in global coordination challenges Part 2
  10. Presentation on most common attacks in Bitcoin
  11. 51% Attack Bitcoin.it Wiki explanation
  12. Selfish Mining a 25% attack against Bitcoin
  13. Sybil attack as described in Wikipedia
  14. Nothing at Stake and Long-range attacks in PoS
  15. $5 wrench Attack XKCD comic on the cheapest attack on cryptography

Token Engineering

Labels

  1. Wiki: Token Engineering
    • "Creating tokenized ecosystems is hard. How do we figure out what we want? How do we manifest that intent with block rewards and other crypto building blocks? How do we simulate and validate the design? How do we anticipate attacks and respond to them? How do we update the protocols? Given that these systems are wildly powerful, how can we better take responsibility for their design & deployment?"
  2. Towards a Hierarchy of Token Building Blocks
  3. History Is Rhyming: Fitness Functions & Comparing Blockchain Tokens To The Web by Simon de la Rouviere
  4. Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information by Simon de la Rouviere
  5. TE Series Part I: Can Blockchains Go Rogue? by Trent McConaghy
  6. TE Series Part II: Towards a Practice of Token Engineering, with presentation deck here by Trent McConaghy
  7. Token Engineering Case Studies Analysis of Bitcoin, Design of Ocean Protocol by Trent McConaghy

Cryptoeconomic Primitives

  1. ☑️ The Emergence of Cryptoeconomic Primitives by Jacob Horne
    • "Protocol based incentives systems that are uniquely enabled by tokens. Also referred to as “tokenized economic games”."
  2. ☑️ Rewriting the Story of Human Collaboration - Or, an Introduction to Token Bonding & Curation Markets
    • Token Curated Registries (i.e. TCRs)
    • Token-Ranked Lists (i.e. TRLs)
    • Curation Markets (i.e bonding curves)
    • Prediction Markets
    • Stablecoins
    • Geospatial Markets

Token Curated Registries

Code: https://github.com/skmgoldin/tcr

  1. ☑️ Token Curated Registries 1.0 by Mike Goldin
    • "Token-curated registries are decentrally-curated lists with intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list’s contents judiciously."
    • "Token holders have a tactical incentive to challenge and reject every candidate to their registry in the interest of increasing their holdings, but this is at odds with their strategic interest of increasing the value of their holdings. An empty list is of no interest to consumers, so candidates would not bother applying to it. Candidates drive fundamental demand for a registry’s intrinsic token, and so by behaving tactically rather than strategically, token holders go against their own interests and incur a potentially severe financial loss. Generally, it is in the interest of economically rational token holders to behave strategically and curate a high-quality list."
    • Mike’s Cryptosystems Manifesto
      • "A token must work as a necessary element of a self-sustaining system which is a public utility."
  2. ☑️ Token Curated Registries 1.1, 2.0 TCRs, new theory, and dev updates by Mike Goldin
  3. City Walls & Bo-Taoshi: Exploring the Power of Token-Curated Registries
    • TCRs == binary, Curation Markets (i.e. Bonding Curves) == continuous
  4. Token Curated Registry (TCR) Design Patterns
  5. Graded Token-Curated Decisions with Up-/Downvoting — Designing Cryptoeconomic Ranking and Reputation Systems
  6. Token Curated Registries in Development
  7. Subjective vs. Objective TCRs
  8. Incentive alignment in Token Curated Registries
  9. ☑️ Learnings from MetaX on Launching The First Token-Curated Registry (TCR)
  10. ☑️ Investable Token Curated Registries
  11. ☑️ Sponsored Burning for TCR
  12. ☑️ When Can Token Curated Registries Actually Work?
  13. ☑️ :rage3: Curate This: Token Curated Registries That Don’t Work.
Projects
  • Civil
  • FOAM
  • adChain
  • District0x

Token-Ranked Lists

  1. ☑️ Introducing Token-Ranked Lists (TRLs)

Curation Markets (Curved Bonding Contracts or Token Bonding Curves)

  1. ☑️ Token Bonding Curves Explained
  2. ☑️ Can We Save The Utility Token?
  3. Continuous Token-Curated Registries: The Infinity of Lists by Simon de la Rouviere
  4. Tokens 2.0: Curved Token Bonding in Curation Markets by Simon de la Rouviere
  5. Solving Price Discovery Of Non-Rivalrous Goods (with Curved Bonding) by Simon de la Rouviere
  6. How to Make Bonding Curves for Continuous Token Models
  7. Bonding curve simulation using Incentivai
  8. Dynamic Token Bonding Curves
    • "What if we had bonding curves that used the shared funds in a bonding contract, but the curve were based on the individual token holder’s ‘activity’ (i.e. their portion of the total token supply)?"
  9. On Bonding Curves as Funding Mechanisms
  10. Futarchy with Bonding Curve Tokens
  11. GitHub: curve-bonded-tokens
Projects
  • Bancor

Curated Governance

  1. ☑️ Curated Governance with Stake Machines

Curated Reputation

  1. ☑️ Claims Curated Registries: Thoughts on reputation development - [See TCRs]

Other

  1. Hashtag Markets: Mashing together Reddit, Schelling Points, Tokenisation & Autonomous Organisations by Simon de la Rouviere
  2. Token curated playlists #1: thoughts on staking and consumer applications by Felipe Gaúcho Pereira
  3. Re-Fungible Token (RFT) by Billy Rennekamp

Tools

  1. ☑️ Incentivai
    • "... is a tool for testing mechanism design of smart contract economies. It is done prior to deployment onto blockchain via simulation using AI agents."

Tokenomics

  1. Token sales models Token sales models by Vitalik Buterin
  2. Traditional Asset Tokenization by Stephen McKeon
  3. A business guide to Tokenomics by William Mougayar
  4. Cryptoasset Valuations by Chris Burniske
  5. Justified Token Value by Adrian Jonklaas
  6. Understanding Token Velocity
  7. On Value, Velocity and Monetary Theory
    • "The velocity of money is the rate at which money is exchanged from one transaction to another. It also refers to how much a unit of currency is used in a given period of time."
  8. The Token Classification Framework a multi-dimensional tool for understanding and classifying crypto tokens
  9. MV = PQ isn't right for crypto a case made by Austere Capital
  10. The Blockchain Token Velocity Problem
    • "Most utility tokens don't provide a compelling reason for token holders to hold the token for more than a few seconds."
  11. The quantitative theory of money for tokens a rebuttal of the MV = PQ theory by Warren Weber
  12. NVT - network value to transactions ratio a market to transaction value proposal by Coinmetrics

Stablecoins

  1. Ethereum Madrid's Cryptoeconomics 101 presentation on Stablecoins by Sandra Becker of Ethereum Madrid
  2. An Overview of stablecoins
  3. Stablecoins: A Holy Grail in digital cryptocurrencies
  4. Volatility and Mass Adoption: 2 reasons we would benefit from a stablecoin
  5. The search for a stable cryptocurrency
  6. An Experiment with Sai, a simple stablecoin by MakedDAO
  7. ☑️ Maker for Dummies: A Plain English Explanation of the Dai Stablecoin
  8. Designing a price stable currency by Haseeb Qureshi
  9. A skeptic view of stablecoins

State Channels

  1. Compact and very well explained definition
  2. Overview on the Raiden Network
  3. Generalised State Channels on Ethereum
  4. Introducing multi-party state-channels
  5. A state-channels adventure with Counterfactual Rick by SpankChain (SFW!)

Empirical Cryptoeconomics

  1. How manipulation-resistant are Prediction Markets? How manipulation-resistant are Prediction Markets? Our Undertaking in Empirical Cryptoeconomics by Gnosis
  2. Empirical Cryptoeconomics Vitalik Buterin's post on empirical cryptoeconomics
  3. Testing mechanism design with AI agents Tool for Smart Contract testing with concept paper and intro

Videos

Consensus Protocols

  1. Consensus Consensus Algorithm - Andreas Antonopoulos
  2. Intro to Casper Karl Floersch presenting Ethereum's Casper PoS
  3. PoS roundtable PoS roundtable with Joseph Poon, Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, Dominic Williams, Zack Hess at Cryptoeconomicon 2015
  4. PoW roundtable PoW roundtable with Tim Swanson, Vitalik Buterin and Peter Todd at Cryptoeconomicon 2015
  5. Proof of Stake - Technion Cyber and Computer Security Summer School and presentation deck
  6. CESC2017 - Casper Proof of Stake
  7. Hangout - Ethereum PoS: Casper FFG In Depth and the presentation
  8. Hangout - Ethereum PoS: Casper & Smart Contract Consensus Overview and the presentation deck

Cryptoeconomics

  1. Game Theory in Bitcoin Game Theory approach behind the motivation for Bitcoin mining
  2. CESC2017 - Cryptoeconomics in Casper
  3. What is Cryptoeconomics Vlad Zamfir introducing Cryptoeconomics
  4. Introduction to Cryptoeconomics Vitalik Buterin introducing Cryptoeconomics. The corresponding presentation deck is available here
  5. Hard problems in Cryptoeconomics Vitalik Buterin discussing hard problems with cryptoeconomics
  6. The Cryptoeconomic way Vitalik Buterin discussing cryptoeconomics.
  7. Cryptoeconomic Protocols In the Context of Wider Society Vitalik Buterin discussing cryptoeconomics. The corresponding presentation deck is available here
  8. The current state of Cryptoeconomics The current state of Cryptoeconomics by Vlad Zamfir
  9. Programmable Incentives by Karl Floersch at Devcon 3
  10. Hard problems in cryptoeconomics by Vitalik Buterin
  11. Cryptoeconomic Primitives
  12. Global Scale Research Networks and Cryptoeconomics
  13. Towards a Practice of Token Engineering by Trent McConaghy
  14. Cryptoeconomic Theory an on-going series by Viktor Makarskyy with part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4

State Channels

  1. The Raiden Network, a technical introduction
  2. Short introduction to the The Raiden Network by Lefteris Karapetsas
  3. State Channels explained in detail by Ameen Soleimani

Cryptoeconomic Security

  1. The costs of hacking Bitcoin Sybil attacks explained
  2. Game theory and Network Attacks- How to destroy Bitcoin by by Max Fang 03/2017
  3. Game theory and Network Attacks- How to destroy Bitcoin by Nadir Akhtar and Aparna Krishnan 11/2017
  4. 51% Attacks: Pools and Game Theory
  5. Nothing at stake Introducing the nothing at stake attack
  6. Security Considerations of the Casper Protocol Vlad Zamfir at Standford's Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2017

Cryptography

  1. Cryptography for Cryptocurrency
  2. Bitcoin - Cryptographic hash functions
  3. Hashed based signatures An illustrated primer

Additional

  1. BBC Documentary Adam Curtis' "Fuck you buddy" BBC documentary

Podcasts

  1. Q&A on Casper Vlad Zamfir answering questions regarding Ethereum's Casper PoS
  2. PoW attacks Podcast from 2015 on PoW attacks
  3. Cryptoeconomics, Stablecoins, Casper with Vlad Zamfir, and corresponding transcript is available here
  4. Fintech Podcast - Episode 151 Cryptoeconomics as explained by Dr Chris Berg
  5. Cryptoeconomic Primitives by Trent McConaghy

Whitepapers

  1. Bitcoin Whitepaper
  2. Ethereum Whitepaper
  3. Blockchain Consensus Protocols in the Wild
  4. dBFT Whitepaper The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication by IBM Research
  5. Federated Byzantine Agreements by Stellar Development Foundation's David Mazieres
  6. Research Paper on PoS vs. Pow by Bitfury
  7. Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer
  8. Game Theory approach behind Bitcoin mining
  9. Research Paper on the security model in PoW by ETH Zurich and others
  10. A Note on Limits on Incentive Compatibility and Griefing Factors
  11. Research Paper on eclipse attacks on the Bitcoin Network
  12. Research Paper on eclipse attacks on the Ethereum Network
  13. Research paper on hashrate-based double spend attack
  14. Satoshi Risk Tables
  15. MakerDAO Purple Paper
  16. Sweetbridge Liquidity Protocol
  17. Bancor Protocol
  18. Maker Dai Stablecoin
  19. Curation Markets by Simon de la Rouviere
  20. The Economics of BitCoin Price Formation This paper analyses the relationship between BitCoin price and supply-demand fundamentals of Bitcoin
  21. A Cost of Production Model for Bitcoin
  22. The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol Analysis and Applications
  23. Cryptocurrencies without PoW
  24. Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain

Books

  1. Game Theory - A Graphic Guide

Other Resources

  1. Casper PoS Discourse Ethereum Foundation's Discourse channel on Casper
  2. Evolution of Trust Fun interactive game by Nicky Case showing the evolution of group trust over time
  3. Formal verification on Casper Formal verification on Casper
  4. Ethresear.ch Casper research topic
  5. CECS - CryptoEconomics Security Conference
  6. Reddit subgroup
  7. Telegram Group
  8. RIAT - Institute for Future Cryptoeconomics a research group from Austria
  9. Cryptoeconomics Asia is an independent research firm
  10. Cryptoeconomics at RMIT University a research group of economists in Australia
  11. Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics Vienna University of Economics and Business
  12. MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab MIT's first cryptoeconomics lab

Blockchain Hacks and Post-mortems

The DAO

  1. The DAO can turn into a naturally arising Ponzi prescient article by Hacking Distributed
  2. Analysis of the DAO Exploit by Hacking Distributed
  3. Thoughts on the DAO hack by Hacking Distributed

Parity MultiSig

  1. Parity's Post-mortem
  2. Deep dive into the Parity hack

King of Ether

  1. King of Ether Post-mortem

Additional information and related topics

Behavioural Economics

  1. BE Ted Talk Prof. Dan Ariely's Ted Talk on Behavioural Economics

Related Ideas

  1. Wikipedia: Groupthink
  2. Sunk Cost Fallacy

Related Lists

  1. Awesome Economics
  2. Awesome Cryptography
  3. Awesome DeFi

License

CC0

To the extent possible under law, Joaquim Pedro Antunes has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this work.

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