Bitcoin P2P Network Measurements: A testbed study of the effect of peer selection on transaction propagation and confirmation times

TL;DR

This study uses a testbed to analyze how peer selection strategies in Bitcoin's P2P network influence transaction propagation and confirmation times, revealing that default strategies may underperform under high load conditions.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of Bitcoin's peer selection impact on network performance, highlighting limitations of default strategies under high transaction arrival rates.

Findings

Peer selection strategies significantly affect transaction propagation.

Default distance-based strategy performs poorly under high load.

High arrival intensity increases forks in the network.

Abstract

Bitcoin is the first and the most extensive decentralized electronic cryptocurrency system that uses blockchain technology. It uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to operate without a central authority and propagate system information such as transactions or blockchain updates. The communication between participating nodes is highly relying on the underlying network infrastructure to facilitate a platform. Understanding the impact of peer formation strategies, peer list, and delay are vital on understanding node to node communication. To this aim, we performed an extensive study on the transaction characteristic of Bitcoin through a Testbed. The analysis shows that peer selection strategies affect the transactions propagation and confirmation time. Moreover, the default distance-based peer selection strategy in Bitcoin performs less when there is high arrival intensity and creates high number forks.