Title
Blockchain Inefficiency in the Bitcoin Peers Network.
Abstract
We investigate Bitcoin network observing transactions broadcasted into the network during a week from 04/05/2016 and then monitoring their inclusion into the blockchain during the following seven months.We unveil that 42% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 1 h from their appearance and 20% of the transactions are still not included in the Blockchain after 30 days, therefore revealing a great inefficiency in the Bitcoin system. However, we observe that most of these “forgotten” transactions have low values and in terms of transferred value the system is less inefficient with 93% of the transactions value being included into the Blockchain within 3 h and 98.8% within a day. The fact that a sizeable fraction of transactions is not processed timely casts serious doubts on the usability of the Bitcoin Blockchain for reliable time-stamping purposes. It also calls for a debate about the right systems of incentives which a peer-to-peer unintermediated system should introduce to promote efficient transaction recording
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0159-3
EPJ Data Sci.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Blockchain,Bitcoin,Transaction inefficiency
Journal
abs/1704.01414
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2193-1127
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.66
3
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giuseppe Pappalardo159563.41
Tiziana di Matteo2334.83
Guido Caldarelli338240.76
Tomaso Aste45711.62