On Blockchain We Cooperate: An Evolutionary Game Perspective

Abstract: Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science focus on fault tolerance problems with consensus algorithms, economic research utilizes incentive designs to analyze agent behaviors. To achieve cooperation on blockchains, emerging interdisciplinary research introduces rationality and game-theoretical solution concepts to study the equilibrium outcomes of various consensus protocols. However, existing studies do not consider the possibility for agents to learn from historical observations. Therefore, we abstract a general consensus protocol as a dynamic game environment, apply a solution concept of bounded rationality to model agent behavior, and resolve the initial conditions for three different stable equilibria. In our game, agents imitatively learn the global history in an evolutionary process toward equilibria, for which we evaluate the outcomes from both computing and economic perspectives in terms of safety, liveness, validity, and social welfare. Our research contributes to the literature across disciplines, including distributed consensus in computer science, game theory in economics on blockchain consensus, evolutionary game theory at the intersection of biology and economics, bounded rationality at the interplay between psychology and economics, and cooperative AI with joint insights into computing and social science. Finally, we discuss that future protocol design can better achieve the most desired outcomes of our honest stable equilibria by increasing the reward-punishment ratio and lowering both the cost-punishment ratio and the pivotality rate.