On of the pros of Bitcoin since its birth is that it’s a public ledger, anyone is allowed to send and receive payments and data on the Blockchain. However, Bitcoin’s network does not provide a way of encrypting communication between nodes, which allows manipulation of data, mass surveillance and analysis of its users.

Although encrypted communication is currently a possibility with VPNs, TOR or other mechanisms, it is not easy for the average user to setup such a connection. There is BIP draft called BIP151 that aims to add encrypted communication to Bitcoin’s network and which currently seems implemented only by Armory.

Jonas Schnelli presented an overhauled version for BIP 151 with some major changes:

Reddit user /u/StopAndDecrypt posted the following chart, showcasing the speed of Block Propagation over the Bitcoin Network:

When blocks return to their maximum capacity, we will have normalized data for making better comparisons. StopAndDecrypt describes this as “an efficiency floor of 1-2 seconds and delay may no longer be the scaling bottleneck”.

This data has been retrieved from https://dsn.tm.kit.edu/bitcoin/.

Bitcoin Network Node Summary Node Count: 10,512 (-333) Mempool Size: 4,347,253 bytes (+3,464,607 bytes) Block Summary Avg. Block Time: 8.57 min ( -0.40 min ) Avg. Block Size: 0.70 mb ( -0.10 mb ) Transaction Summary Raw 24hr Tx Volume: 210,772 ( -2,993 ) SegWit Transactions: 32.84% ( +0.16% ) Witness Size: 11.60% ( -5.07% ) Mining Summary Difficulty: 3,839,316,899,029 ( +328,256,346,130 ) Hash Rate: 30,154,849,563 GH/s ( +273,448,237 GH/s )

Bitcoin Network Node Summary Node Count: 10,845 Mempool Size: 882,646 Block Summary Ave. Block Time: 8.97 min Ave. Block Size: 0.83 mb Transaction Summary Raw 24hr Tx Volume: 213,765 SewWit Transactions: 32.68% Witness Size: 16.67% Mining Summary Difficulty: 3,511,060,552,899 Hash Rate: 28,100,258.45 TH/s Lightning Network Nodes: 1,826 Channels: 4,864 Channels per Node: 2.66 Capacity: 1,288,944,658.00 sat