Estimating the Peer Degree of Reachable Peers in the Bitcoin P2P Network

TL;DR

This paper uses a spam wave in the Bitcoin P2P network to estimate peer connectivity, revealing most peers run with default settings and refining peer count estimates by grouping addresses to avoid overcounting.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate reachable peer degrees using spam-induced measurements and improves peer count accuracy by grouping addresses, reducing overestimation.

Findings

Most peers run with default connection limits

Nearly all connection slots are occupied

Address grouping reduces peer count overestimation by 13%

Abstract

A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers in the network. The resulting distribution shows that about every second reachable peer runs with Bitcoin Core's default setting of a maximum of 125 concurrent connections and nearly all connection slots are taken. We validate this result and, in addition, use our observations of the spam wave to group addresses that belong to the same peer. By doing this grouping, we improve on previous measurements and show that simply counting addresses overestimates the number of reachable peers by 13 %.