tl;dr: Incentives do indeed play a big role in the Bitcoin protocol. They are crucial for its security and effectively drive its daily operation. As argued her

tl;dr: Incentives do indeed play a big role in the Bitcoin protocol. They are crucial for its security and effectively drive its daily operation. As argued here, miners go to extreme lengths to maximize their revenue and often find creative ways to do so that are sometimes at odds with the protocol. Cryptocurrency protocols should be placed on stronger foundations of incentives. There are many areas left to improve, ranging from the very basics of mining rewards and how they interact with the consensus mechanism, through the rewards in mining pools, and all the way to the transaction fee market itself.