Abstract
The Bitcoin virtual currency is built on the top of a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network used to propagate system information such as transactions or blockchain updates. In this paper, we have performed a data collection process identifying more than 872000 different Bitcoin nodes. This data allows us to present information on the size of the Bitcoin P2P network, the node geographic distribution, the network stability in terms of interrupted availability of nodes, as well as some data regarding the propagation time of the transmitted information. Furthermore, although not every Bitcoin user can be identified as a P2P network node, measurements of the P2P network can be considered as a lower bound for Bitcoin usage, and they provide interesting results on the adoption of such virtual currency.
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Notes
- 1.
The name of the application is a pun with the first author’s name, who was the developer of the application.
- 2.
However, as we explain in Sect. 3.3, the number of Bitcoin nodes does not map directly with the number of Bitcoin users, so the adoption rates have to be interpreted accordingly.
- 3.
Blockchain.info is a web page that offers information about Bitcoin blocks and transactions. They have a public API that allows to query for specific information. We used the API to obtain their received_time for each of the blocks.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by a student grant of the Master in Security of Information and Communication Technologies (MISTIC), at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB), and by the Spanish Government projects, TIN2011-27076-C03-02 CO-PRIVACY, TIN2010-15764 N-KHRONOUS, CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-0004 ARES, and grant FPU-AP2010-0078.
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Donet Donet, J.A., Pérez-Solà, C., Herrera-Joancomartí, J. (2014). The Bitcoin P2P Network. In: Böhme, R., Brenner, M., Moore, T., Smith, M. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8438. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_7
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