
Bitcoin's Underlying Incentives - yarapavan
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3168362
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yarapavan
tl;dr:

Incentives do indeed play a big role in the Bitcoin protocol. They are crucial
for its security and effectively drive its daily operation. As argued here,
miners go to extreme lengths to maximize their revenue and often find creative
ways to do so that are sometimes at odds with the protocol.

Cryptocurrency protocols should be placed on stronger foundations of
incentives. There are many areas left to improve, ranging from the very basics
of mining rewards and how they interact with the consensus mechanism, through
the rewards in mining pools, and all the way to the transaction fee market
itself.

