Bitcoin Network Simulator

Copyright (C) 2013 Rafael Brune mail@rbrune.de

Purpose

BTCsim is a stochastic event-based continuous-time Bitcoin network simulator. It can be used to study block chain generation and forking, block propagation, network dynamics and miner/mining-pool interactions and strategies.

Project Status

At the moment it does not simulate propagation/inclusion of transactions but it does simulate verification time and propagation time based on (random) block sizes, verification speed and network latency/bandwidth.

Included are two examples:

• attack-51.py demonstrates the effect of badly behaving miner with 51% of the network hashing power
• attack-selfish.py implements a selfish miner with 30% of the network hashing power

At the moment the implemented network messages are not a perfect mirror of the Bitcoin protocol. For example the miners have to request missing blocks one-by-one from connected nodes instead of receiving them all at once. This can lead to slow-downs/lots of message passing with huge block-chain forks.

Contributors

Rafael Brune mail@rbrune.de