Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Short Paper: What Peer Announcements Tell Us About the Size of the Bitcoin P2P Network

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13411))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Bitcoin is based on a P2P network of which only a few quantities are publicly known. While the number of peers that disseminate transactions and blocks is relevant for the robustness of the network, only the number of reachable peers is so far being measured. However, there exists an unknown number of unreachable peers in the network, that is, peers that do not accept incoming connections but typically also disseminate transactions and blocks. We propose the Passive Announcement Listening (PAL) method that gives an estimate of the number of unreachable peers by observing peer announcements in addr messages. We use the PAL method to analyze data from a long-term measurement of the Bitcoin P2P network from 2015 to 2022. The PAL estimate shows that since 2018 the number of unreachable peers is at least three times higher than the number of reachable peers. An empirical validation indicates that about 76% of all unreachable peers announce their address and the PAL approach finds about 94% of these unreachable peers. Thus, we estimate the total number of unreachable peers in May 2022 to be around 34,000. We also report on a spam wave of addr messages that shows that peer announcements ‘leak’ even more information than the size of the network.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Biryukov, A., Khovratovich, D., Pustogarov, I.: Deanonymisation of Clients in Bitcoin P2P Network. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 15–29. CCS 2014, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, November 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2660267.2660379

  2. Bitcoin-Developers: Bitcoin Reference (2019). https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/index.html

  3. Bitcoin-Developers: Bitcoin Glossary (2020). https://developer.bitcoin.org/glossary.html

  4. Delgado-Segura, S., Pérez-Solà, C., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Borrell, J.: Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm. Mob. Inf. Syst. 2018(3), 1–16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/2159082

  5. Donet Donet, J.A., Pérez-Solà, C., Herrera-Joancomartí, J.: The Bitcoin P2P network. In: Böhme, R., Brenner, M., Moore, T., Smith, M. (eds.) FC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8438, pp. 87–102. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44774-1_7

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. DSN: Bitcoin Network Monitoring (2021). https://dsn.kastel.kit.edu/bitcoin/

  7. Franzoni, F., Daza, V.: Improving Bitcoin Transaction Propagation by Leveraging Unreachable Nodes. In: 2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), pp. 196–203 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00031

  8. Garay, J., Kiayias, A., Leonardos, N.: The Bitcoin backbone protocol: analysis and applications. In: Oswald, E., Fischlin, M. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2015. LNCS, vol. 9057, pp. 281–310. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46803-6_10

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Grundmann, M., Amberg, H., Hartenstein, H.: On the estimation of the number of unreachable peers in the Bitcoin P2P network by observation of peer announcements. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.12774 (2021)

  10. Grundmann, M., Baumstark, M., Hartenstein, H.: On the peer degree distribution of the Bitcoin P2P network. In: 2022 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), pp. 1–5 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC54727.2022.9805511

  11. Heilman, E., Kendler, A., Zohar, A., Goldberg, S.: Eclipse attacks on Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network. In: Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium, pp. 129–144. SEC2015, USENIX Association, USA (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Imtiaz, M.A., Starobinski, D., Trachtenberg, A., Younis, N.: Churn in the Bitcoin Network. IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage. 18(2), 1598–1615 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2021.3050428

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Nick, J.: Guessing Bitcoin’s P2P Connections (2015). https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2015/03/06/guessing-bitcoins-p2p-connections/

  14. van der Laan, W.J.: BIP 155: addrv2 message (2019). https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0155.mediawiki

  15. Luke-Jr: Bitcoin Node Count History (2021). https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html

  16. Miller, A., et al.: Discovering Bitcoin’s Public Topology and Influential Nodes (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Tech. rep. (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Naumenko, G., Maxwell, G., Wuille, P., Fedorova, A., Beschastnikh, I.: Erlay: efficient transaction relay for Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security - CCS 2019, pp. 817–831. ACM Press, London, United Kingdom (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3354237

  19. Neudecker, T., Andelfinger, P., Hartenstein, H.: Timing Analysis for Inferring the Topology of the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network. In: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing, pp. 358–367 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0070

  20. Neudecker, T.: Characterization of the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network (2015–2018) (2019). https://doi.org/10.5445/IR/1000091933

  21. Park, S., Im, S., Seol, Y., Paek, J.: Nodes in the Bitcoin network: comparative measurement study and survey. IEEE Access 7, 57009–57022 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2914098

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Shahsavari, Y., Zhang, K., Talhi, C.: A theoretical model for block propagation analysis in Bitcoin network. IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage. PP(99), 1–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2020.2989170

  23. Tange, O.: GNU Parallel 20200522 (‘Kraftwerk’) (2020). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3841377

  24. Wang, L., Pustogarov, I.: Towards Better Understanding of Bitcoin Unreachable Peers. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.06837 (2017)

  25. Yeow, A.: Bitnodes (2021). https://bitnodes.io

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Till Neudecker and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. The authors acknowledge support by the State of Baden-Württemberg through bwHPC. This work was supported by funding from the topic Engineering Secure Systems of the Helmholtz Association (HGF) and by KASTEL Security Research Labs.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. KASTEL Security Research Labs, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Matthias Grundmann, Hedwig Amberg, Max Baumstark & Hannes Hartenstein

Authors
  1. Matthias Grundmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hedwig Amberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Max Baumstark
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Hannes Hartenstein
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Grundmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ittay Eyal

  2. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Juan Garay

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Grundmann, M., Amberg, H., Baumstark, M., Hartenstein, H. (2022). Short Paper: What Peer Announcements Tell Us About the Size of the Bitcoin P2P Network. In: Eyal, I., Garay, J. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13411. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_35

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_35

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-18282-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-18283-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation