Misusing "Game Theory"

[BitcoinErrorLog]

The term "game theory" is often used, both in BCAP and the broader discourse, but never with formal proofs, models, or game theoretical concepts. Instead, the term seems to be used as a prop and scientific justification for biased speculation on incentives and strategy.

The lack of formal game-theoretical models in both BCAP and general Bitcoin discussions leaves many assertions about resilience and strategic behavior as qualitative guesses at best, rather than quantitatively proven, and wild, deceptive, or naive claims at worst.

These claims need rigorous modeling to move beyond hand-wavy speculative statements about possible human behaviors and market dynamics.

[rencryptofish]

i think the sensitivities and direction are probably in the right direction but curious if you disagree on those

agreed that we can expand it with payoff functions but those payoff functions are pretty hard to estimate with precision for continuous payoffs, we can try to do a quantized discrete approach.

do you have a rough formalization of this you have in mind?

[BitcoinErrorLog]

I think it is impossible to change Bitcoin without centralization, and that it is impossible to provide or measure the agency of Bitcoin users. We already have consensus, any change should come from overwhelming demand, paired with substantiated arguments, demos, statistics, etc. The topic of trying to assess and predict Bitcoin behaviors is probably anthropological at best.