2021/08/02 by Matthias Grundmann, Grundmann, Matthias, Max Baumstark +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #cs.CR #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2108.00815
openalex publication_date 2021/08/02 · arxiv created 2021/12/15 · arxiv updated 2021/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers in the network. The resulting distribution shows that about every second reachable peer runs with Bitcoin Core's default setting of a maximum of 125 concurrent connections and nearly all connection slots are taken. We validate this result and, in addition, use our observations of the spam wave to group addresses that belong to the same peer. By doing this grouping, we improve on previous measurements and show that simply counting addresses overestimates the number of reachable peers by 13 %.