Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms
<|reference_start|>Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms: To allocate transactions to blocks, cryptocurrencies use an auction-like transaction fee mechanism (TFM). A conjecture of Roughgarden [44] asks whether there is a TFM that is incentive compatible for both the users and the miner, and is also resistant to off-chain agreements (OCAs) between these parties, a collusion notion that captures the ability of users and the miner to jointly deviate for profit. The work of Chung and Shi [12] tackles the problem using the different collusion resistance notion of side-channel proofness (SCP), and shows an impossibility given this notion. We show that OCA-proofness and SCP are different, with SCP being strictly stronger. We then fully characterize the intersection of deterministic dominant strategy incentive-compatible (DSIC) and OCA-proof mechanisms, as well as deterministic MMIC and OCA-proof ones, and use this characterization to show that only the trivial mechanism is DSIC, myopic miner incentive-compatible (MMIC) and OCA-proof. We also show that a randomized mechanism can be at most 0.842-efficient in the worst case, and that the impossibility of a non-trivial DSIC, MMIC and OCA-proof extends to a couple of natural classes of randomized mechanisms.<|reference_end|>
@article{gafni2024barriers,
    title={Barriers to Collusion-resistant Transaction Fee Mechanisms},
    author={Yotam Gafni and Aviv Yaish},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.08564},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.08564},
    primaryClass={cs.GT econ.TH}
}