Transaction Characteristics of Bitcoin

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Bitcoin's transaction characteristics, offering new insights into its transaction and traffic behaviors and validating existing hypotheses through measurement.

Contribution

It presents the first thorough measurement-based study of Bitcoin's transaction processes, revealing key traffic patterns and validating prior assumptions.

Findings

Insights into Bitcoin transaction confirmation times

Validation of existing hypotheses about transaction behavior

Enhanced understanding of Bitcoin's traffic characteristics

Abstract

Blockchain has been considered as an important technique to enable secure management of virtual network functions and network slices. To understand such capabilities of a blockchain, e.g. transaction confirmation time, demands a thorough study on the transaction characteristics of the blockchain. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin -- the first blockchain application, focusing on the underlying fundamental processes. A set of results and findings are obtained, which provide new insight into understanding the transaction and traffic characteristics of Bitcoin. As a highlight, the validity of several hypotheses/assumptions used in the literature is examined with measurement for the first time.