Kriptosare.gen, a dockerized Bitcoin testbed: analysis of server performance

TL;DR

This paper introduces Kriptosare.gen, a Docker-based Bitcoin testbed that enables controlled network experiments, providing insights into resource requirements and network behavior similar to real Bitcoin systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a fully automated, Dockerized Bitcoin testbed for deploying customizable networks and analyzing resource usage, which was not previously available.

Findings

Testbed can simulate real Bitcoin network conditions

Resource requirements scale with network parameters

Cost analysis provides insights into computational needs

Abstract

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer distributed cryptocurrency system, that keeps all transaction history in a public ledger known as blockchain. The Bitcoin network is implicitly pseudoanonymous and its nodes are controlled by independent entities making network analysis difficult. This calls for the development of a fully controlled testing environment. This paper presents Kriptosare.gen, a dockerized automatized Bitcoin testbed, for deploying full-scale custom Bitcoin networks. The testbed is deployed in a single machine executing four different experiments, each one with different network configuration. We perform a cost analysis to investigate how the resources are related with network parameters and provide experimental data quantifying the amount of computational resources needed to run the different types of simulations. Obtained results demonstrate that it is possible to run the testbed with a configuration similar to a real Bitcoin system.