Effect of EIP-1559 base fee dynamics on economic censorship strategies

Investigate whether combining Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base fee manipulation with priority-fee outbidding enables an attacker to sustain effective censorship in the multi-round fraud-proof games; incorporate base fee dynamics into the model and determine the impact on optimal strategies and budget thresholds.

Background

The paper’s models focus on priority fees (tips) as auction-like bids used by attackers to censor defender transactions. Under EIP-1559, Ethereum also uses a dynamically adjusted base fee that rises when blocks are persistently full, potentially making prolonged censorship via simple outbidding unsustainable.

The authors explicitly note uncertainty about whether an attacker could mix priority-fee outbidding with base fee manipulation to craft a more effective strategy, and they suggest incorporating base fee dynamics into the model. Resolving this would clarify the viability of such combined tactics and their implications for challenge period and budget settings.