Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network

Measure how Bitcoin announcements travel. The median time and the long tail are what set a safe block interval.

Official external source only
Design paper
Official source

Record

Authors: Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2013
Publisher: Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer
Version: Source cited by the 2013 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0162
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.

Direct answer

Measure how Bitcoin announcements travel. The median time and the long tail are what set a safe block interval.

Where to read

Official source — IEEE P2P 2013
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.

What changed

A reading of the public document. Not a copy of it, and not a claim about a later network that reused the name.

Relationships

Canonical readingBitcoin network study
Related paperEclipse Attacks
Related paperSelfish Mining

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Decker, C., & Wattenhofer, R. (2013). Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network. Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer. https://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~ler/docencia/rcs1314/papers/P2P2013_041.pdf

BibTeX

@techreport{bitcoinnetwork2013,
  title = {Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network},
  author = {Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer},
  year = {2013},
  institution = {Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer},
  url = {https://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~ler/docencia/rcs1314/papers/P2P2013_041.pdf},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin-network}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network
AU  - Christian Decker
AU  - Roger Wattenhofer
PY  - 2013
PB  - Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer
UR  - https://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~ler/docencia/rcs1314/papers/P2P2013_041.pdf
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

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  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0162",
    "title": "Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Christian Decker"
      },
      {
        "literal": "Roger Wattenhofer"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
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          2013
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    "publisher": "Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer",
    "URL": "https://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~ler/docencia/rcs1314/papers/P2P2013_041.pdf",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

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Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections