Should there be an economic review of EIPs?

Currently the AllCoreDevs and now the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians provide technical review of EIPs. When this work is performed, are engineers responsible for evaluating the economic implications (macro and crypto)?

A large amount of the thinking that went into the core protocol, and now going into Casper, Sharding, and so many other initiatives involve crypto-economics. As blockchains become more similar to traditional economies, initiatives may need to also consider macro-economics.

How is the community to know that expert economic review has been performed and consensus reached about the feasibility a proposal?

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This is an extremely important consideration. Also, what testing has been done to show that the economic mechanisms operate consistent with their intended purpose at scale with a simulation or game? Technical correctness is also important, but economic design is arguably more important to show in the broader context.

Want to add my support for how important this is, although I don’t have an answer to your question yet:

How is the community to know that expert economic review has been performed and consensus reached about the feasibility a proposal?

As a starting point it may be worth discussing the way this works today. My understanding is that it’s (surprise surprise!) very informal and that certain individuals with experience in cryptoeconomics/incentive mechanism design, such as @Arachnid, weigh in with valuable opinions on the All Core Devs calls. We also get a lot of armchair economists weighing in on the EIPs and on Reddit.

Would it be worth considering adding an “economic implications” sections to EIPs, where relevant?

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Yes! “Economic Considerations” and maybe “Network Considerations”

Just getting the conversation started on those two topics, a little bit of the author’s insight into how this might affect things, that would be very useful.

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