Bitcoin's dynamic peer‐to‐peer topology

Abstract

Summary Topology discovery is a prerequisite when investigating the network properties; with the enormous number of Bitcoin users and performance issues, it becomes critical to analyse the network in a fashion that makes it possible to detect all Bitcoin's nodes and understand their behaviour. In massive, dynamic, and distributed peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks like Bitcoin, where thousands of updates occur per second, it is hard to obtain an accurate topology representing the structure of the network as a graph with nodes and links by using the traditional local measurement approaches based on batches, offline data, or on the discovery of the topology around a small set of nodes and then combine them to discover an approximate network topology. All of which present some limitation when applying them on blockchain‐based networks. In this paper, we propose a topology discovery system that performs a real‐time data collection and analysis for Bitcoin P2P links, which assembles incoming nodes information for deeper graph analysis processing. The topology discovery system allows us to gain knowledge on the Bitcoin network size, the network stability in terms of reachable, churn, and well‐connected nodes, as well as some data regarding the effects of some countries' Internet infrastructure on Bitcoin traffic.

A Comprehensive Study of the Bitcoin P2P Network

“…In 2018, Deshpande et al [20] and in 2020, Essaid et al [31] presented a similar technique to infer the topology. They developped an emulator and emulated a probable topology of the network but not the real one.…”

Statistical privacy-preserving message broadcast for peer-to-peer networks

“…The number of created connections maintained by new nodes is often fixed in the client source code. Examples of this construction are the network of Bitcoin [20] and classic Gnutella [6].…”

Block diffusion delay attack and its countermeasures in a Bitcoin network

“…3 In recent years, several researchers tried to reveal the Bitcoin network. 28,29 Miller et al first analyzed the topology of the real Bitcoin network by using the method called AddressProve. 28 They confirmed that most nodes had degrees in the range of 8-12, which were close to the maximum number of outgoing connections.…”

“…Because of the security and anonymity concerns, the Bitcoin system intentionally aims to conceal the structure of the Bitcoin network 3 . In recent years, several researchers tried to reveal the Bitcoin network 28,29 . Miller et al first analyzed the topology of the real Bitcoin network by using the method called AddressProve 28 .…”