The Dilemma of Parameterizing Propagation Time in Blockchain P2P Network

Propagation time on permissionless blockchain plays a significant role in terms of stability and performance in the decentralized systems. A large number of activities are disseminated to the whole nodes in the decentralized peer-to-peer network, thus causing propagation delay. The stability of the system is our concern in the first place. The propagation delay opens up opportunities for attackers to apply their protocol. Either by accelerating or decelerating the propagation time directly without proper calculation, it brings numerous negative impacts to the entire blockchain system. In this paper, we thoroughly review and elaborate on several parameters related to the propagation time in such a system. We describe our findings in terms of data communication, transaction propagation, and the possibility of an interference attack that caused an extra propagation time. Furthermore, we present the influence of block size, consensus, and blockchain scalability, including the relation of parameters. In the last session, we remark several points associated with the propagation time and use cases to avoid dilemmas in the light of the experiments and literary works.