Quote from: proff on February 16, 2013, 06:06:14 PM

The Bitcoin network is a fruitful source of data concerning all sorts of problems in economics, computer science, and applied mathematics. In this post I am concerned with the the underlying dynamic complex network, about which we need to know in order to say anything meaningful about the network stability, efficiency, resilience to various forms of attack, behavior under parameter change (e.g. messing with the block frequency), and anything else you can think of.

Example: consider the "Internet" (whatever that means). We "know" that the nodes form a scale-free network where the number of nodes of degree k is proportional to k^(-2.2) or so (with a cut-off).

For the Bitcoin network, besides the degree distribution, distance and bandwidth between nodes, clustering coefficient, and so on, we need to know things like the processing power of each node (many people are not mining at all! the ones that are are not randomly distributed!) and rates at which different kinds of nodes join or leave the network. One thing we have working in our favor is that the the Bitcoin network is relatively small, therefore it should be possible to obtain some reasonable data.

Does anybody have access to such data? Does anybody want to support this sort of research?

I think this is a very important area of research. I, for one, do not mine, but I keep a 24x7 v0.8.1-beta client running (to strengthen the network). It usually has 50-60 connections. I limit my total upload bandwidth to 500kbps. I would be very interested in knowing many of the things you alluded to. Maybe the client could be enhanced to gather and display network data in the same way that it gathers and retains Bitcoin transaction data. That way everyone would know that they were running on the same network (no bifurcation had taken place) - among other many other things.