BTCmap: Mapping Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network Topology

Bitcoin is a digital currency that has enticed considerable recognition as an alternative solution to the traditional payment system. Its success is mostly due to the use of Blockchain over a decentralised peer-to-peer network. Today’s Bitcoin network has more than 10,000 online peers geographically scattered around the world. However, its topology is still unknown due to security concerns. In this paper, we design and implement a fast and efficient framework named BTCmap to discover and map the Bitcoin network topology. Our BTCmap framework includes two modules viz., a sniffer to collect the local addresses database of each peer, and a Bitcoin peer emulator to select neighbours and generate the topology. Our analyses show that to remain within 1% confidence interval, we have a window of 56 minutes 40 seconds for collecting the local address databases from all peers. Within this time duration, BTCmap requests more than 8200 reachable peers to map the real Bitcoin network topology. We present a Bitcoin topology snapshot captured on June 14, 2018, 15:53 CEST and show that this snapshot is connected.