The Effect of Latency on Selfish-Miner Attack on Block Receive Time Bitcoin Network Using NS3

Abstract

Bitcoin holds the largest market share among all digital currencies. Transaction security is secured in Bitcoin by using blocks with a hash-based Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. Bitcoin PoW takes an average of 10- minutes to complete and 6 consecutive blocks are recommended for a single transaction in the system. PoW is a functional protocol that validates every incoming data to overcome spam attacks and DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service). Selfish miner is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network. The selfish miner succeeds because the honest miners are forced to spend part of their computing cycle on blocks that are destined not to be in the public chain. To achieve higher scalability, network latency must be low, that is the time required for the protocol to confirm the transaction should be effectively reduced. In this study, the author will make a simulation of the effect of latency on block receive time on Bitcoin with selfish-miner attack using NS3. The experimental results show the use of the latency variation and the more number of generated blocks, the lower the MBRT value. The average MBRT of each parameter shows the required receive time by the block number of about 15 minutes to 16 minutes. This amount exceeds the PoW's tolerance time limit when making a transaction. This is due of selfish-miner attack and Latency.