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Table of contents

• Chapter 7. The Blockchain
• 1. Introduction
• • Bitcoin blockchain size | Statista
• Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain size as of February 21, 2021
• Bitcoin Blockchain Size

In addition, a nonce value is added and a new hash value is calculated. Any individual or organization with adequate computing resources, called miners, may attempt to find the signature value. There are thousands of miners in the Bitcoin mining network and they compete to find a signature value. When a miner finds a signature value successfully, he or she can attach the block to the Blockchain and is rewarded with new cryptocurrency [ 9 ].

The block generation and mining process is described in Fig. Unfortunately, this mining process was not designed with scalability in mind. In case of Bitcoin, the blocks are generated approximately every 10 minutes and the maximum block size is 1MB. If the average transaction size is bytes, about 2, transactions can be placed in each block, giving the processing speed of about 3. Another popular Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, uses a slightly different method, and it can achieve the maximum of 15 transactions per second [ 1 ]. This limited mining capacity created a big backlog of unconfirmed transactions and increased the transaction confirmation times recently [ 4 ][ 16 ].

In May it was generally below one hour, but in May it often exceeded 10 hours. Furthermore, the transaction load can be increased abnormally in certain situations such as DDoS attacks, which can create an enormous backlog for legitimate transactions. Mining congestion also caused an increase in the mining fees because miners are more inclined to include those transactions with higher fees in their blocks. Mining congestion is becoming more problematic, as it is limiting the growth of Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies that employ blockchain. While several methods have been proposed, they are still being debated.

We propose a simple method to dynamically adjust the mining capacity based on the mining congestion level. In this scheme called Binary blockchain, we increase the number of chains when the load goes up, and reduce it when the load comes down. Due to the nature of binary division, its mining capacity can be easily increased by an order of thousand. In this paper, we describe the process of Binary blockchain management and related issues. We then compare the performance of Binary blockchain with those of the traditional Blockchain through simulation study.

The topic of mining capacity scalability is actively discussed in the blockchain community [ 26 ]. We will review some of the proposed methods in this section. The most obvious solution is to increase the block size and there are multiple proposals on that [ 6 ][ 23 ].

Chapter 7. The Blockchain

While this can temporarily increase the mining capacity, the same problem will be faced again if the Bitcoin transactions grow continuously. But it is impractical to increase the block size continuously due to the network bandwidth limitation and propagation delay. Another solution is to decrease the block confirmation time. The downside of this approach is the increased probability of fork and orphaned blocks.

Currently, bitcoin block confirmation time is 10 minutes and forks are created a few times per week on the average. Litecoin has proven the viability of a shorter confirmation time of 2. Although the mining period is much shorter in Ethereum, the block size is also much smaller less than 20kB with about transactions per block.

1. Introduction

The block mining period cannot be shortened infinitely either due to the network capacity and propagation delay, as it may cause too much instability to the mining network. Instead of putting the complete transaction information, only the most essential piece of information may be placed in the block. This reduces the amount of storage, and increases the number of transactions in the block. SegWit segregated witness moves some non-critical data, called witness data, out of transactions and off the Blockchain.

While it can immediately increase the capacity, it will eventually face the same problem with the limited block size. Some methods are used to offload transactions from the blockchain, such as off-chain transactions [ 22 ][ 26 ], side chain, merged mining, etc. However, these methods do not address the capacity of the mining network itself directly. Other solutions have been proposed, such as separating the Bitcoin functions on different chains and blocks [ 14 ][ 15 ][ 18 ][ 20 ].

While they offer a scalable solution, they may depend on other factors such as a larger block size e. Another approach is to allow multiple branches to confirm the blocks simultaneously on a disjoint set of transactions.

Binary sharding has been discussed in the Ethereum community, but the details are still being developed. The idea of Tree Chain was proposed earlier [ 25 ], but was only conceptualized and has not progressed enough for further debate. It suggested a tree-structured blockchain where each branch can mine blocks, but the structure is static and cannot respond to the dynamically changing transaction load.

MultiChain [ 7 ][ 17 ] has an aspect of parallel mining, but it is across different blockchains, not in the same blockchain. These parallel mining techniques can increase the mining capacity without increasing the block size or reducing the block mining time, as shown in Fig. In a traditional single-chained blockchain, parallel branches or fork may occur inadvertently while the blockchain information propagates throughout the mining network in p2p fashion.

Since it can create a double spending problem, only one branch must be chosen. The mining network chooses the longest branch between them, and the orphaned blocks get invalidated. In parallel mining, multiple branches are created on purpose, and double spending may be possible if the same transaction gets included in multiple branches. To avoid this, the transactions must be divided into disjoint groups. Binary sharding based on the transaction ID or hash value can be employed for this purpose. To cope with the varying transaction load, the number of parallel chains must be increased or decreased.

In public Blockchain, this decision cannot be made by a single central authority. So the decision to create or delete the chains must be embedded in the Blockchain itself. In Bitcoin, the difficulty level of the mining is adjusted periodically about every two weeks to make the average block confirmation time 10 minutes. Under parallel mining, the mining resources are divided into multiple groups, and consequently, the conformation time will increase with smaller resources.

Therefore, the difficulty level must be reduced accordingly to maintain the minute confirmation time. With parallel mining, there are multiple branches at the same time.

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If the reward amount per block stays same, the total reward will increase, which will violate the design principle of the current Bitcoin system. To prevent it, the size of the reward must be divided by the number of parallel branches so that the total reward is same as in the single blockchain. If the miners are not evenly distributed among the parallel branches, two problems may occur.

Then the confirmation time for a block will be much shorter than 10 minutes.

This increases the possibility of fork and more orphaned blocks, and cause starvation on the other branch where little mining operation is performed. To avoid these risks, there must be a way to spread the miners evenly over the multiple parallel branches. We propose a method that can dynamically adjust the mining capacity based on the mining congestion level. The process of creating and merging the subchains is described in Algorithm 1. We will use the terminology defined in Table 1.

A binary Blockchain increases the mining capacity by twice when the mining pool is split, or decreased when the pool is merged. A new blockchain is not created additively, but by a binary division of the existing chain. When there is a split, the level of chain increases. Each subchain can be split further or merged independently based on its own transaction load. When it is split, both new blocks inherit the hash value from the parent block, thus maintaining the continuity of the blockchain.

When two chains are merged, the merged chains inherit hash values from both parent blocks.

We apply binary sharding as following. Difficulty level adjustment: The difficulty level gets halved for each division. This increases the overall mining capacity by a factor of two. Reward calculation: The reward gets halved for each division. This ensures that the amount of total rewards stays same as in the traditional blockchain regardless of the number of subchains. Balanced mining: Balanced mining can be maintained systematically with the synch blocks. The distance between synch blocks increase by power of 2 after each division. Although it may look similar, Binary blockchain is different from TreeChain in that the whole blockchain or each subchain can dynamically and independently increase or decrease.

It is also different from side chain or data sharding. Since the blockchain is not linear any more, we need to number the blocks differently. The block number increases only within the last subchain level. In Binary blockchain, two subchains top and bottom are created upon division, and we need to differentiate them. For that, we divide the numbers in two groups odd and even and assign them to each subchain.

In the top subchain, the block numbers grow in even numbers 0, 2, 4, … , and in the bottom subchain, they grow in odd numbers 1, 3, 5, …. When the subchains are merged, the last level subchain block number is removed and the upper level subchain numbering continues. An example is shown in Fig. Without any balancing mechanism, one subchain may progress rapidly and create instability in the P2P mining network.

This can cause some instability in the mining network, creating more forks within each subchain [ 13 ]. To ensure a balanced mining resource distribution and synchronous progress among the chains, we introduce a concept of synch blocks. A synch block inherits the hash values from all pre-synch blocks in the sibling chain. So until all pre-synch blocks are confirmed, no miner can proceed further. The synch blocks are placed as following.