Mitigating Security Threats of Bitcoin Network by Reducing Message Broadcasts During Transaction Dissemination

Propagation delay in blockchain networks is a major impairment of message transmission and validation in the bitcoin network. The transaction delay caused by message propagation across long network chains can cause significant threats to the bitcoin network integrity by allowing miners to find blocks during the message consensus process. Potential threats of slow transaction dissemination include double-spending, partitions, and eclipse attacks. In this paper, we propose a method for minimizing propagation delay by reducing non-compulsory message broadcasts during transaction dissemination in the underlying blockchain network. Our method will decrease the propagation delay in the bitcoin network and consequently mitigate the security threats based on message dissemination delay. Our results show improvement in the delay time with more effect on networks with a large number of nodes.