TinyCoin: Simulating fraudolent mining strategies in a simplified Bitcoin Network

Final Project for the course of P2P Systems of the Master Degree in Computer Science and Networking

Folder structure

The src folder contains the source of the project, the lib folder the library needed to run the Peersim Simulator, the bin folder contains the classes compiled and packaged in a .jar file and the docs folder contains the relation of the project and two subfolders statistics, containing the statistics collected by running the program, and plots, containing the plots of the statistics. The subfolders inside docs are populated after a simulation is executed.

Running an experiment

Running an experiment means running a single run of the Peersim Simulator with the configuration parameters defined in tinycoin_config.txt. To run an experiment you simply open the terminal and type

java -jar bin/tinycoin.jar peersim.Simulator tinycoin_config.txt

Running a simulation

A simulation consists in choosing a set of values for the parameters and, for each combination of such values, in runnning the experiment for a given number of times. At the end the experiment will be carried out several times with different parameters values and the results of the repeated execution of the same experiment will be averaged and plotted. It is possible to set up a simulation thanks to the use of scripts:

• start_simulation.py: it's the script that actually starts the simulation. The set of parameters for the simulation are defined in this file. The values provided for these parameters will be substituted in the tinycoin_config_for_script.txt file and a temporary file will be created to run the experiments.
• build_avg_statistics.py: this script, called by start_simulation.py, collects the statistics produced by the executions of the experiments, makes the proper averages and writes in the docs/statistics/avg subfolder these files ready to be plotted
• plot_avg_statistics.py: this script, called by start_simulation.py, reads the files in the docs/statistics/avg subfolder and uses Gnuplot to create the graphs that will be stored in the docs/plots subfolder.

In order to run a simulation, after having set up the values for the parameters in start_simulation.py, you simply need to open terminal and type

python start_simulation.py [repetitions]

The repetitions argument specifies how many times each experiment has to be repeated. If omitted, it defaults to zero.

A description of this project, together with the execution of a simulation and analysis of the results is present in the relation.