Trading Network Performance for Cash in the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Public blockchains have emerged as a plausible cloud-like substrate for applications that require resilient communication. However, sending messages over existing public blockchains can be cumbersome and costly as miners require payment to establish consensus on the sequence of messages. In this paper we analyze the network performance of the Bitcoin public ledger when used as a massaging substrate. We present several real-world observations on its characteristics, transaction visibility, and fees paid to miners; and we propose two models for fee-cost estimation. We find that applications to some extent can improve messaging latency by paying transaction fees. We also suggest that spendings should be kept below 300 Satoshi per byte.