Bitcoin's dynamic peer‐to‐peer topology

Topology discovery is a prerequisite when investigating the network properties; with the enormous number of Bitcoin users and performance issues, it becomes critical to analyse the network in a fashion that makes it possible to detect all Bitcoin's nodes and understand their behaviour. In massive, dynamic, and distributed peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks like Bitcoin, where thousands of updates occur per second, it is hard to obtain an accurate topology representing the structure of the network as a graph with nodes and links by using the traditional local measurement approaches based on batches, offline data, or on the discovery of the topology around a small set of nodes and then combine them to discover an approximate network topology. All of which present some limitation when applying them on blockchain‐based networks. In this paper, we propose a topology discovery system that performs a real‐time data collection and analysis for Bitcoin P2P links, which assembles incoming nodes information for deeper graph analysis processing. The topology discovery system allows us to gain knowledge on the Bitcoin network size, the network stability in terms of reachable, churn, and well‐connected nodes, as well as some data regarding the effects of some countries' Internet infrastructure on Bitcoin traffic.