  In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous
attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain
networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and
tamperproof transaction data ledger. Nowadays, blockchain as the key framework
in the decentralized public data-ledger, has been applied to a wide range of
scenarios far beyond crypto-currencies, such as Internet of Things (IoT),
healthcare, and insurance. This survey aims to fill the gap between the large
number of studies on blockchain network, where game theory emerges as an
analytical tool, and the lack of a comprehensive survey on the game theoretical
approaches applied in blockchain related issues. In this paper, we review game
models proposed to address common issues in the blockchain network. The issues
include security issues, e.g., selfish mining, majority attack and Denial of
Service (DoS) attack, issues regard mining management, e.g., computational
power allocation, reward allocation, and pool selection, as well as issues
regarding blockchain economic and energy trading. Additionally, we discuss
advantages and disadvantages of these selected game models and solutions.
Finally, we highlight important challenges and future research directions of
applying game theoretical approaches to incentive mechanism design, and the
combination of blockchain with other technologies.
