Kriptosare.gen, a dockerized Bitcoin testbed: analysis of server performance
This provides a controlled testing environment for researchers studying Bitcoin, but it is incremental as it builds on existing containerization and simulation techniques.
The paper tackles the difficulty of analyzing the Bitcoin network by developing Kriptosare.gen, a dockerized testbed for deploying custom Bitcoin networks, and demonstrates it can run configurations similar to real systems with quantified computational resource data.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer distributed cryptocurrency system, that keeps all transaction history in a public ledger known as blockchain. The Bitcoin network is implicitly pseudoanonymous and its nodes are controlled by independent entities making network analysis difficult. This calls for the development of a fully controlled testing environment. This paper presents Kriptosare.gen, a dockerized automatized Bitcoin testbed, for deploying full-scale custom Bitcoin networks. The testbed is deployed in a single machine executing four different experiments, each one with different network configuration. We perform a cost analysis to investigate how the resources are related with network parameters and provide experimental data quantifying the amount of computational resources needed to run the different types of simulations. Obtained results demonstrate that it is possible to run the testbed with a configuration similar to a real Bitcoin system.