Performance impact depending on the number of miners

Question

Hi,

We are currently implementing a private blockchain that has initially 15 nodes as miners. If we increase the number of miners, would this have a significant impact on the a.) confirmation time of a transaction, b.) and the propagation time of committed blocks across the blockchain network.

I am new to the blockchain technology so I would like to understand how exactly the number of miners impacts the blockchain network.

Thank you!

Answer 1

In general there is no performance impact from the number of miners. The only issue that can arise is that, depending on your mining settings, there could be forks. These are always resolved but doing so does have an impact on performance. In general we recommend avoiding this in a private blockchain by setting mining-turnover=0.0 – more information here:

https://www.multichain.com/developers/blockchain-parameters/