Effects of a Simple Relay Network on the Bitcoin Network

Abstract

Bitcoin has a low transaction throughput. In order to allow for an increase of this throughput without increasing orphan blocks, decreasing the block propagation time is important. One of the techniques to improve its block propagation time is to utilize relay networks. However, the effects of utilizing relay networks is not apparent. Existing studies and measurements on relay networks have not focused on the effect of relay networks on the individual miners. Moreover, the relation between the degree of the effect and relay network utilization rate is unknown. Herein, we performed simulations while finely changing the proportion of nodes utilizing a relay network. Moreover we quantitatively evaluated the effect of relay networks on the entire Bitcoin network and individual miners. Results show that the propagation time decrease to approximately 77% of the original value if the utilization rate is set to 3%. This rate is close to the actual utilization rate of relay network "Falcon". We also found that the probability of blocks created by utilizing nodes to become orphan blocks is surprisingly smaller than that of the non-utilizing nodes. Even in the worst case, the value of utilizing nodes is 15% of the value of non-utilizing nodes.