Bitcoin Network Measurement and a New Approach to Infer the Topology

Bitcoin has made an increasing impact on the world’s economy and financial order, which attracted extensive attention of researchers and regulators from all over the world. Most previous studies had focused more on the transaction layer, but less on the network layer. In this paper, we developed BNS(Bitcoin Network Sniffer), which could find and connect nodes in the Bitcoin network, and made a measurement in detail. We collected nearly 4.1 million nodes in 1.5 hours and identified 9,515 reachable nodes. We counted the reachable nodes’ properties such as: service type, port number, client version and geographic distribution. In addition, we analyzed the stability of the reachable nodes in depth and found nearly 60% kept stable during 15 days. Finally, we proposed a new approach to infer the Bitcoin network topology by analyzing the Neighbor Addresses of Adjacent Nodes and their timestamps, which had an accuracy over 80%.