Counting Nodes in Ethereum Blockchain

Blockchains are distributed peer-to-peer networks that facilitate the interaction between two or more non-trusting parties in a verifiable manner. Smart contracts are software programs that run on a blockchain and form the basis of many new blockchain applications and schemes. They are automated systems that can provide services in exchange for cryptocurrency. A node is a device on a blockchain network that maintains a copy of a blockchain and participates in the consensus. The more nodes participating in the consensus, the more copies there are of the blockchain, and thus the more resilient and less latency in sharing the blocks. The amount of research currently available on determining the number of nodes in a blockchain is minimal. In this thesis, we study the node counting techniques and their overhead on the public blockchains. We count the nodes in the Ethereum private network and Ethereum public network using a method proposed in the literature. We then modify the counting techniques to perform connections at a higher rate and measure its impact on the network. We perform our study and present results both from the public Ethereum network and a large private Ethereum testing network.