Blockchain Participation Games with Upfront Contribution Commitment

Overview & Synopsis

Blockchain participation games combine costly entry, random participation selection, and threshold success into consideration. Their retraction variants charge task-completion costs only to selected contributors. We consider committee tasks whose operators reserve costly computing or communication capacity before assignment, so preparation costs are incurred even when that capacity is not selected. We characterize all pure Nash equilibria under homogeneous selection and analyze how heterogeneous selection shapes who commits. We characterize how the homogeneous minimum-outlay reward scheme supports full contribution, where every user commits, as a Nash equilibrium. Moreover, under heterogeneous selection, requiring zero registration reward can increase the minimum outlay. Finally, when full contribution is a positive-welfare social optimum, the homogeneous zero-registration-reward design attains price of stability one; and under independent Bernoulli selection, every full-contribution Nash equilibrium is also a strong equilibrium.