Social Choice Around the Block: On the Computational Social Choice of Blockchain
This work addresses the problem of integrating social choice theory into blockchain design for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it primarily identifies challenges rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper argues that computational social choice is crucial for blockchain research, as blockchain designers face economic mechanism design issues in a computational setting, and identifies challenges at the interface of these fields to highlight potential cross-fertilization.
One of the most innovative aspects of blockchain technology consists in the introduction of an incentive layer to regulate the behavior of distributed protocols. The designer of a blockchain system faces therefore issues that are akin to those relevant for the design of economic mechanisms, and faces them in a computational setting. From this perspective the present paper argues for the importance of computational social choice in blockchain research. It identifies a few challenges at the interface of the two fields that illustrate the strong potential for cross-fertilization between them.