  Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a
way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce
an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed
block rewards. We analyze some of the incentive compatibility issues that arise
from transaction fees, which relate to the bids that users submit, the
allocation rules that miners use to choose which transactions to include, and
where they choose to mine in the context of longest-chain consensus. We start
by surveying a variety of mining attacks including undercutting, fee sniping,
and fee-optimized selfish mining. Then, we move to analyzing mechanistic
notions of user incentive compatibility, myopic miner incentive compatibility,
and off-chain-agreement-proofness, as well as why they are provably
incompatible in their full form. Then, we discuss weaker notions of nearly and
$\gamma$-weak incentive compatibility, and how all of these forms of incentive
compatibility hold or fail in the trustless auctioneer setup of blockchains,
examining classical mechanisms as well as more recent ones such as Ethereum's
EIP-1559 mechanism and \cite{chung}'s burning second-price auction. Throughout,
we generalize and interrelate existing notions, provide new unifying
perspectives and intuitions on analysis, and discuss both specific and
overarching open problems for future work.
