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Reducing the number of transaction messages in bitcoin

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Abstract

Data propagation in the Bitcoin network is inefficient due to its permissionless nature and the lack of multicast/broadcast features. In particular, the number of messages needed to propagate a single transaction is very high which is rather wasteful in terms of bandwidth utilization. In this work we propose two simple modifications of Bitcoin software that allows a vast reduction of the number of messages needed for propagating a transaction over the network. The first modification consists of deferring the transaction announcements until a certain predefined number of new transactions is collected. The second modification consists of a new message format that allows several transactions to be sent within a single message. We show that the number of messages can be substantially reduced in this manner, at the expense of slight increase in transaction propagation delay. However, the latency of block propagation and of transaction acceptance is virtually unaffected by the proposed changes. Moreover, the tradeoff between the reduction of traffic and transaction delay can be minimized by judicious choice of the threshold number of deferred transactions.

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Notes

  1. Segregated Witness, Bitcoin developer documentation, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segregated_Witness, last accessed: 2021/12/16 00:30:19.

  2. History of Bitcoin page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin, last accessed 2021/12/16 00:30:19.

  3. http://www.anylogic.com

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  5. https://azure.microsoft.com/.

  6. https://www.blockchain.com/charts

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St., Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Vojislav B. Mišić & Jelena Mišić

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of Security and Privacy in Intelligent Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

    Xiaolin Chang

Authors
  1. Vojislav B. Mišić
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  2. Jelena Mišić
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  3. Xiaolin Chang
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Correspondence to Vojislav B. Mišić.

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Mišić, V.B., Mišić, J. & Chang, X. Reducing the number of transaction messages in bitcoin. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 15, 768–782 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-021-01278-0

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