Challenges in Public Economic Consensus by Vlad Zamfir. Slides. (Ethereum DevCon1)

An informative introduction to Public Economic Consensus and problems regarding possible attacks and how to economically analyze them. In such protocols (e.g. proof of work) it is not enough to analyze the correctness of the protocol but also to show that attacks are prohibitively expensive in terms of their economical costs. Nodes participating in the protocol are assumed to be economical rational agents that will work towards maximizing profit.

The main idea is that:

• Economic consensus is the only known way to defend public consensus protocols from Sybil attacks;
• Therefore, we must use economic analysis rather than fault tolerance analysis to analyze public consensus protocols (bold because it is important :);