[Bitcoin-development] Bitcoin Network Simulator

[Rafael Brune <mail@rbrune.de>]

Over the last days I spent some time working on a simple Bitcoin network simulator.
It is a stochastic event-based continuous-time simulation of Bitcoin miners
exchanging messages and building block chains. It simulates latency, bandwidth 
and also verification speed but it currently does not simulate propagation/inclusion
of transactions and instead uses random block sizes.

The simulator includes two examples, one for a 51% attack and the other is an
implementation of selfish mining (pretty much 1:1 as described in the paper).
With the random parameters I picked it seems like it pays off to mine selfish with
>=30% of the hashing power - but take this with a huge grain of salt as this
is with a very small network and randomly chosen parameters. And of course it
is not a perfect replica of the real world network.

Since this is based on my understanding of the Bitcoin network and protocol it
would be great if others would take a look and help improve it.

The project can be found on my github:
https://github.com/rbrune/btcsim

Regards,
 Rafael Brune