Solving The Impossible Problem: An Anti-Gaming Primer

by Matthew Patrick, Nik Hawks, and Max Gold

The glorious possibility of a DePIN, that of gathering a group of strangers together to achieve something far greater than any fraction of them could achieve, carries with it an inherent burden:

Some people cheat.

That’s not to say all people are immoral, or even that most people are rat-bastards. Most people are good, willing to work hard, take a few chances, and enjoy a system that gives them an opportunity to grow.

It’s just that in any given population there’ll be a few rat-bastards who’ll try to take more than their fair share without contributing fair value. You might call that cheating. In DePIN, we call that “gaming”. Defined clearly:

Gaming is actions taken by participants to receive rewards unfairly.

Most of the rest of society has rules about cheating; what it is, what happens when you get caught, and mechanisms for filtering it out. We have traffic lights on our roads, turnstiles in the subways, and time cards at work. Backed by a group tasked with enforcing those rules, society is generally fair.

DePINs, and crypto in general, have few rules and almost no enforcement. How then do DePINs function?

DePINs persuade people to do something that is good for the network using incentives. Bad incentives create bad networks. Good incentives create generally good networks.

Gaming in DePINs: A Human Problem, Not Just a Technical One

The first temptation to be overcome when designing incentives is to realize that stopping gaming isn’t solely a technical issue. Gaming is deeply rooted in human behavior. People game DePIN for three main reasons:

• Poorly designed incentives
• Frustration at the system
• Perceptions of unfairness

I know, I know, I said that incentives capture most of the reasons to game. They do, I just want to be comprehensive here, and also to help you understand that incentives aren’t the ONLY reason people game.

Sometimes your gaming problem is just as much a result of poor messaging and community management as it is of bad incentives. It’s important to make sure you’re staying on top of all these elements.

One way to prevent gaming that’s non-technical is to think of and treat your deployers as if they’re a critical part of your team rather than an element you have to use just to get what you want.

This includes building the incentive model to encourage beneficial behavior, as well as routinely highlighting helpful community members, involving your community in the decisions your project makes regarding how incentives work, and transparently dealing with the problems within the platforms you’ve set up (typically Discord and X).

Remember, gamers will game due to poorly designed incentives, but they’ll also game because they get frustrated, or feel the system is unfair. In the first case they’ll typically keep it to themselves, but as they get frustrated they’ll form separate groups outside your official channels, creating an alternate team to game your system. Often this happens in Telegram, which can make it very difficult to find and monitor their concerns and strategies.

The best way to combat this is to deal directly (and yes, repetitively) with accusations or discomfort within your public community platforms. If you’re getting complaints in Discord about how a certain miner is doing XYZ, or why an aspect of the system is the way it is, address it quickly, directly and transparently.

If needed, set up a separate channel in your Discord to handle these; make sure that those who are dissatisfied know that their complaints or observations are being addressed.

Helium and Nova Labs did not do this enough, setting the stage for problems with trust later on. This isn’t to say they knowingly made the wrong move by maintaining a secret denylist. At the time it seemed reasonable and the only way to combat the gaming.

Unfortunately, that lead to a narrative of “They’re just doing stuff for their own benefit anyway, so I’ll do whatever. Who knows that else they’re secretly up to!”

The lesson learned here is to keep your anti-gaming efforts transparent, making sure gamers stay within your communications system so you can address their concerns.

Building Networks That Aren’t Easily Gamed

The best systems give no financial incentive to cheat because productive actions are more rewarding.

This is simple in theory but requires significant effort to think through the various courses of action a deployer might take in order to maximize their gains.

It’s tempting to just throw out an incentive for what you *want* a deployer to do, but it’s vital to think about what you don’t want them to do as well, making sure the incentives penalize the “don’t want” behavior as much as they promote the “do this” behavior.

Back the incentives using physics as a constraint. This means not allowing token rewards between hotspots where that communication is physically impossible; say, 2 Helium Hotspots on opposite sides of a mountain. This can be designed as a scale, with some abnormal behavior acceptable (I mean, you do get a radio bounce every so often), but as the evidence starts to contradict expected physics limitations, cutting off rewards.

There’s no need to invent anything new here, models like Longley-Rice are well established and used in industry already.

An important aspect of building networks that can’t be gamed is not a physical factor, it’s a human one: Make anti-gaming efforts transparent to the community. Yes, this will help gamers design better avoidance mechanisms, but the value lost there is incomparable when held up to the trust gained by the community from a transparent system.

Build The System To Identify & Manage Gaming Clusters

A “gaming cluster” is a group of miners that collaborate to exploit the system in ways that garner unearned rewards. Setting up the system to fundamentally make this transparent to anyone watching is an important aspect of the DePIN architecture.

Again, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel. Tools like graph theory can be used to analyze clustering coefficients, a concept proposed in 1998 by Watts & Strogatz in the paper Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.

Graph theory itself is hundreds of years old, invented in 1736 by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler to solve the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg” problem.

By incorporating elements of graph theory and other tested mathematical tools into the monitoring and rewarding capabilities of the network architecture itself, you’ll embed the ability for both the initial core and the growing community to easily discover and solve gaming cluster problems.

When building the system, include monitoring and visualization to correlate physical and logical connections. For example, if clusters of wallets AND devices are geographically close and only interacting with each other (and not other nearby devices), this is a strong indication of gaming in wireless networks.

The system should be built to involve and enable the community to quickly identify gaming entities, not relying solely on a core team of super-geniuses to figure it out on their own, or forcing the community to build their own bolt-on tools just to see what’s going on in the network.

This can be as simple as providing heat maps to identify high-earning areas, or the stats of nodes that are “gaming-likely” so everyone can see this. This builds a system of complementary assets harnessed towards the same goal.

One example from Helium is “witness stuffing”, where one well placed Helium Hotspot forward spoofed packets to other hotspots that may be in a closet but pretending to be well placed. This gaming vector in Helium is marked by inconsistent signal strength readings.

A dashboard (ideally open-sourced) allowing anyone to run monitoring of this and other vectors heightens the trust and decreases the temptation to game.

The Limits of Anti-Gaming: Proof of Location as The Impossible Problem

Building dashboards and architecting the system to be transparent to gaming is good, but it isn’t a perfect solution. Gamers are smart, tech-savvy, and driven; they’re hard to entirely stamp out. They also have a particular advantage in a so-far unsolved problem, one we call The Impossible Problem.

The Impossible Problem: Proving location with limited data is nearly impossible. GPS spoofing is a well-known issue, and no system can perfectly verify location without heavy intervention.

With the exception of projects like Onocoy, where proving location is what they do and they inherently have the advantage of a network with an independent satellite ephemeris stream (basically a way to check and make that the location matches state-run location networks), DePINs have no single foolproof way to provide Proof of Location.

Currently the best option is to use fractional solutions, combining reported signals, mapping verification, latency, and other markers of location along with well designed incentives to provide, if not proof, justification for restricting rewards to gaming miners.

The Role of Incentives In Preventing Gaming

Finally we come to incentives. While obviously a critical part of any anti-gaming solution, incentives function in collaboration with community trust and engagement, the laws of physics, and transparency into the functionings of the network.

Well-structured rewards get your community to build the network you want. Clearly identifying the network you want is the first step in a long road of designing a robust and productive incentive system.

Do Anti-Gaming Strategies Encourage or Retard Growth?

Paradoxically, gaming can be a useful way to rapidly grow a network. If participants feel like they can find and exploit an “edge”, they will devote significant resources to that.

This points to an important aspect of building your incentives; locking down a network so that no gaming exists can stifle growth. In the same way that a weak incentive only produces weak results, an overly strict set of rules where everything is “too fair” can also retard growth.

Remember, the first successful end-point of a DePIN is the largest network to have existed so far. Once you get there you’ve made it past the first obstacle and have a fighting chance to compete in the market. Without that size, web2 offers more advantages than just decentralization alone overcome.

You want a network that rewards extraordinary effort with extraordinary return; this is a way to build peak-performer networks. It also leaves the door open for gamers. As long as that slice of gaming isn’t detracting from the overall goal of global dominance for that network, in many cases it’s fine for a small amount of gaming to exist.

As long as your anti-gaming methods are open to community input, transparently applied, and strategically designed to encourage a robust and ubiquitous network, tolerating the tokens lost to the extraordinary efforts of a few gamers is a cost of doing DePIN business.

Conclusion

When designing for anti-gaming, combine elements of transparency in monitoring, building community trust, and established theory to provide an architecture focused on delivering a global juggernaut in the technology sphere you operate in while providing for a margin of lost tokens to dedicated gamers.

When founders have a crystal clear idea of the network topology they need, then focus on building a fair playing field WITH their community, gaming as a value-drain is part and parcel of building on the new economics of DePIN.

Disclaimer: Financial Interests and Consulting Services Disclosure

This blog post may contain references to various cryptocurrency projects, tokens, or assets. It is important to note that the authors of this blog post and Gold Hawks & Associates may have a financial interest in some of these projects or may provide consulting services to them, or in some cases, both.

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