Apropos of...

Apropos of me reading and thinking too much and asking dumb questions - why do people talk in terms of game theory in crypto when the fundamental mechanism of a crypto network is a state machine at a node on the network and there is no human involved except to turn it on?

Retired Tradfi coder, dedicated AI hacker. Dad cook. Dog butler.  Happy Grandpa.

If there was just one human to turn it on, what would be the point of the network without other self interested actors changing the system state ? The fundamental mechanism is just the rules of the game / environment. In order to have utility, the network still requires actors to affect the network state.

CTO @ System 9, building the future of high frequency market making in crypto.

What you say may be true in the human space, but computer nodes are just automata defining their state based on inputs from other automata. How humans behave around that observed state is many and varied. My contention is state rules are all that need be discussed and behavioural theories are irrelevant.

I see where you’re coming from, but imo it’s an oversimplification. If human space was irrelevant , why would we care about security budgets ? How would we model and think about actor (network user) behavior? My contention is that humans and many of the tools they build are inherently interlinked and adaptive.