34 Pages Posted: 18 Nov 2017

Date Written: November 6, 2017

Abstract

Bitcoin has the potential to replace all existing payment systems to become the world’s primary infrastructure for commerce over the internet. However, to grow in scale to meet the demands of such a system’s current imposed constraints will need to be lifted. We have simulated the existing network and extrapolated to alternative future networks to test the hypothesis that the infrastructure is capable of handling increased block sizes. We have also simulated the effect of introducing a Fast Payment Network in which merchants can pay a premium for faster propagation of their transactions. We show that the network can scale up indefinitely with no limit on block sizes and that a Fast payment network mitigates double spend attacks.