The Economics of Cryptocurrency Mining with Aviv Zohar | a16z crypto research talks

Mining, which stands at the center of cryptocurrency protocols, is understood well from a security standpoint, but stands on less firm ground from the perspective of economic incentives. Aviv Zohar (Hebrew University) discusses several recent results on the economics of mining protocols, including some recently discovered manipulations that miners can perform, as well as recent attempts at formalizing the behavior of miners from a financial perspective. He presents work here on proof-of-work mining as option pricing; a relatively new MEV time-stamp manipulation; and stretching and squeezing (time-based) attacks.
About the speaker
Aviv is a faculty member at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a co-founder at QED-it. He has been researching the economics of computational systems and protocols and has made several contributions relating to the scalability, security, and underlying incentives of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. More: www.avivz.net/
About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
Our researchers are technologists, scientists, cryptographers, and cryptocurrency experts, working to bridge the worlds of academic theory with industry practice, and to help shape crypto and web3 as a formal area of study. More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research
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