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Collusion-Resilience in Transaction Fee Mechanism Design

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  • Hao Chung
  • Tim Roughgarden
  • Elaine Shi

Abstract

Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive compatibility (UIC), miner incentive compatibility (MIC), and a form of collusion-resilience called OCA-proofness. Ethereum's EIP-1559 mechanism satisfies all three properties simultaneously when there is no contention between transactions, but loses the UIC property when there are too many eligible transactions to fit in a single block. Chung and Shi (SODA'23) considered an alternative notion of collusion-resilience, called c-side-contract-proofness (c-SCP), and showed that, when there is contention between transactions, no TFM can satisfy UIC, MIC, and c-SCP for any c at least 1. OCA-proofness asserts that the users and a miner should not be able to "steal from the protocol." On the other hand, the c-SCP condition requires that a coalition of a miner and a subset of users should not be able to profit through strategic deviations (whether at the expense of the protocol or of the users outside the coalition). Our main result is the first proof that, when there is contention between transactions, no (possibly randomized) TFM in which users are expected to bid truthfully satisfies UIC, MIC, and OCA-proofness. This result resolves the main open question in Roughgarden (EC'21). We also suggest several relaxations of the basic model that allow our impossibility result to be circumvented.

Suggested Citation

  • Hao Chung & Tim Roughgarden & Elaine Shi, 2024. "Collusion-Resilience in Transaction Fee Mechanism Design," Papers 2402.09321, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2402.09321
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Tim Roughgarden, 2020. "Transaction Fee Mechanism Design for the Ethereum Blockchain: An Economic Analysis of EIP-1559," Papers 2012.00854, arXiv.org.
    2. Matheus V. X. Ferreira & Daniel J. Moroz & David C. Parkes & Mitchell Stern, 2021. "Dynamic Posted-Price Mechanisms for the Blockchain Transaction Fee Market," Papers 2103.14144, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2021.
    3. Maryam Bahrani & Pranav Garimidi & Tim Roughgarden, 2023. "Transaction Fee Mechanism Design with Active Block Producers," Papers 2307.01686, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.
    4. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
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