Cryptoeconomics refers to as the study of economic interaction in adversarial environments. The cryptography underlying these systems is what makes the P2P communication within the networks secure, and the economics is what incentivizes all actors to contribute to the network so that it continues to develop over time.
Cryptoeconomics combines the disciplines of cryptography, computer networks and game theory which provide secure systems exhibiting some set of economic dis/incentives.
YOUTUBE pKqdjaH1dRo
Introduction to Cryptoeconomics - Vitalik Buterin. Broadcast on 23 Feb 2017. - Slides at vitalik.ca 
Ethereum developer Vlad Zamfir, says that cryptoeconomics might be:
A formal discipline that studies protocols that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy. Cryptoeconomics is a practical science that focuses on the design and characterization of these protocols.
The underlying challenge is that in decentralized P2P systems, that do not give control to any centralized party, one must assume that there will be bad actors looking to disrupt the system. Cryptoeconomic approaches combine cryptography and economics to create robust decentralized P2P networks that thrive over time despite adversaries attempting to disrupt them - blockchainhub.net
Before the advent of Bitcoin, it was commonly believed to be impossible to achieve fault tolerant and attack resistant consensus among nodes in a P2P network (Byzantine General’s Problem). Satoshi Nakamoto introduced economic incentives to a P2P Network and solved that problem in the Bitcoin White Paper published in 2008.
While decentralized P2P systems based on cryptography were nothing new – see Kazaa and BitTorrent – what these P2P systems before Bitcoin lacked was economic incentive layer for coordination of the network of participants. Satoshi’s implementation of a Proof of Work (POW) consensus mechanism introduced a new field of economic coordination game, now referred to as cryptoeconomics.
# Tags
# See also
- https://medium.com/@cryptoeconomics
- Economics back into Cryptoeconomics - medium
- The Use of Knowledge in Society