Confirmation Delay Prediction of Transactions in the Bitcoin Network

Bitcoin is currently the most popular digital currency. It operates on a decentralised peer-to-peer network using an open source cryptographic protocol. In this work, we create a model of the selection process performed by mining pools on the set of unconfirmed transactions and then attempt to predict if an unconfirmed transaction will be part of the next block by treating it as a supervised classification problem. We identified a vector of features obtained through service monitoring of the Bitcoin transaction network and performed our experiments on a publicly available dataset of Bitcoin transaction.