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2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

The Bitcoin P2P Network

Authors : Joan Antoni Donet Donet, Cristina Pérez-Solà, Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí

Published in: Financial Cryptography and Data Security

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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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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previous chapter Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools

next chapter Fair Two-Party Computations via Bitcoin Deposits

The name of the application is a pun with the first author’s name, who was the developer of the application.

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.

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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Title: The Bitcoin P2P Network
Authors: Joan Antoni Donet Donet
Cristina Pérez-Solà
Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book: Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44773-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-44774-1

Copyright Year: 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_7

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