Characterizing Orphan Transactions in the Bitcoin Network

TL;DR

This paper investigates orphan transactions in the Bitcoin network, revealing their characteristics, impact on network throughput, and how adjusting orphan pool size can mitigate associated overhead.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic measurement and analysis of orphan transactions, highlighting their features and proposing solutions to reduce network overhead.

Findings

Orphan transactions tend to have fewer parents than non-orphans.

Missing parents of orphans usually have lower fees and larger sizes.

Network overhead from orphans can exceed 17%, but is reducible by increasing orphan pool size.

Abstract

Orphan transactions are those whose parental income-sources are missing at the time that they are processed. These transactions are not propagated to other nodes until all of their missing parents are received, and they thus end up languishing in a local buffer until evicted or their parents are found. Although there has been little work in the literature on characterizing the nature and impact of such orphans, it is intuitive that they may affect throughput on the Bitcoin network. This work thus seeks to methodically research such effects through a measurement campaign of orphan transactions on live Bitcoin nodes. Our data show that, surprisingly, orphan transactions tend to have fewer parents on average than non-orphan transactions. Moreover, the salient features of their missing parents are a lower fee and larger size than their non-orphan counterparts, resulting in a lower transaction fee per byte. Finally, we note that the network overhead incurred by these orphan transactions can be significant, exceeding 17% when using the default orphan memory pool size (100 transactions). However, this overhead can be made negligible, without significant computational or memory demands, if the pool size is merely increased to 1000 transactions.