Level: MA
Responsible Person: Yu Gao
Keywords: Bitcoin P2P protocol, Network modeling

Decentralised Leger technology(DLT) is a type of technology that enables a network of

computers to maintain and update a distributed digital ledger. Each node in DLT has a copy of a shared ledger, and the ledger is updated through the consensus of the peers. No central node is the spirit of DLT. With or without blockchain, DLT can be mainly divided into 5 layers which are the application layer, consensus layer, Peer-to-Peer Network, data layer, and Hardware layer. The research of DLTs consequently falls into the relevant categories: smart contracts, consensus mechanisms, peer-to-peer networks, and transaction networks. Among these areas, many researchers are focusing on analyzing transaction networks, evaluating the performance of consensus mechanisms, and the level of decentralization they achieve in practice. However, there needs to be more research dedicated to studying peer-to-peer networks, an area that deserves more attention given the critical importance of blockchain security. The intrigue about the DLT P2P network persists even though some blockchain protocols claim that the connections among peers in their P2P network are entirely random.

Like most distributed P2P networks, to prevent the network from being controlled by malicious nodes, the connection state of the peer-to-peer network is designed to be unknown to the public. Consequently, the first problem we face is data collection, the empirical P2P data is not directly available from the decentralized cryptosystem. There are some ready references for the local data crawl methods[1-], however, we need to develop a new method to collect the data as the number of peers increased a bit, which will be used as the benchmark of our network model.

It’s important to note that the absence of a central node is a fundamental characteristic of DLT systems. However, the lack of a central data controller doesn’t necessarily imply an absence of supernodes within the network. In unstructured DLT P2P networks, if small-world performance is observed due to users’ social relationships, nodes with substantially higher degrees than the majority can wield considerable influence, introducing potential risks. Those high-degree nodes, acting as influencers, may pose threats such as disrupting the entire network in the event of their failure, whether due to technical issues or targeted attacks.

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