dataforge-labs/litecoin-network-propagation

Litecoin network propagation

How fast the Litecoin peer network learns things, measured from connections held to its reachable peers at once.

Nothing here can be reconstructed later. A block carries only the timestamp its miner claimed, an announcement carries none at all, and a peer's own relay policy is broadcast and forgotten.

Contents

name	one row is
e25_ltc_block_propagation	one peer announcing one block, timestamped
e25_ltc_tx_propagation	one peer announcing one transaction, timestamped
e25_ltc_relay_floor	one peer's own minimum relay fee, at the moment it announced it
e25_ltc_p2p_peers	one peer connected to: user agent, services, handshake state

Why a second chain at all

Litecoin runs the same wire protocol as Bitcoin and targets a block every 2.5 minutes rather than 10. That makes it the denser of the two: one short window produced 69 block announcements here against 2 on Bitcoin over the same period, because there is simply more to see.

It exists so the Bitcoin figures have something to be compared against. A propagation delay or a relay-floor distribution means little on its own; it means considerably more set beside the same measurement on a chain with four times the block rate and a different node population. The companion panels are in bitcoin-network-propagation, collected by the same code in the same process, which is what makes the comparison fair.

The node population is different, and that is the point

Peers here run LitecoinCore, and the versions observed spread much wider than Bitcoin's, from 0.21.x down to a node still on 0.15.1. Relay floors spread wider too: one sample held 0.1, 1.0 and 100.0 sat/vB, the last being a node that will not forward anything remotely ordinary.

Before you build on this

• Peers come from DNS seeds rather than a crawler, because Litecoin has no Bitnodes equivalent. Two of the four published seeds no longer resolve, so the reachable set is smaller and more concentrated than Bitcoin's. It is a sample of the network and a narrower one.
• Timings are ours and include network distance to each peer. Differences of milliseconds are partly geography; differences of seconds are not. peer_addr is retained so this can be controlled for.
• Transactions are announced with deliberately randomised timing on this network too, so the transaction table measures that privacy behaviour rather than raw relay speed. Compare it against the block table, not against zero.
• Transactions are SAMPLED at roughly one in ten, by txid. This chain carries enough of them that keeping everything would dominate the whole project's storage. The test is a property of the hash, so it is identical on every peer and a curve is never truncated by when we started watching. The Dogecoin and Bitcoin Cash panels are quiet enough to keep everything, and say so.
• A peer that disconnects stops announcing, which resembles slowness. e25_ltc_p2p_peers carries handshake state so a gap can be told from a silence.

Partitions are parquet, one file per collection window, under dataset/YYYY/MM/. Every dataset here carries a FIXED 7-day sample WINDOW starting at its own first day of collection, together spanning 2026-08-30 to 2026-09-05, so you can check schema, coverage and quality before asking for more. It does not advance, so there is nothing to gain by re-downloading it. The full history is held privately, available on request.

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
import pandas as pd, glob

path = snapshot_download("dataforge-labs/litecoin-network-propagation", repo_type="dataset",
                         allow_patterns="e25_ltc_block_propagation/**")
df = pd.concat(map(pd.read_parquet,
                   glob.glob(f"{path}/e25_ltc_block_propagation/**/*.parquet", recursive=True)))

Coverage

e0_run_manifest lists every collection window with its poll counts and failure counts, and is published in full rather than windowed. Gaps between windows are real, cannot be filled in afterwards, and nothing here is interpolated.

License and contact

ODC-BY: use it freely, credit "DataForge (dataforge-labs)". Questions and requests for the full history via the discussions tab.