Network Usage of Bitcoin Full Node

Bitcoin, the most popular peer-to-peer electronic cash system stands strong in its feature of decentralized architecture based on the blockchain technology. The blockchain platform allows the maintenance of a shared distributed ledger, which can be simultaneously read/accumulated by all participants without being owned/controlled by any central unit or person. This paper focuses on scoping the networking side of the Bitcoin blockchain network. In our study, we analyze how Bitcoin utilizes the flooding peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol to broadcast events through the bitcoin network to update the replicas of the ledger. We then use the collected data to identify the process of data propagation, the broadcasting delay, and the bandwidth needed to keep up with the ledger real-time updates.