Laptop-scale benchmark of BlockSim, Simewu, and IOTA hornet for network practitioners

Abstract Open-source simulators let engineers stress-test blockchain ideas long before field deployment, yet few studies compare tools side-by-side. This tutorial article benchmarks two research-grade simulators, namely, BlockSim and Simewu, and the production-grade IOTA Hornet node under an identical traffic harness that runs on laptop-class hardware. Results show that consensus style dominates capacity. A DAG ledger that finalizes one milestone per second (≈ 6 tx s⁻¹) surpasses the 10 Transactions Per Second (TPS) ceiling of a six-node Bitcoin simulation, while Ethereum-style 12 s blocks lift the same mesh to approximately ~ 20TPS.BlockSim reproduces proof-of-work fairness within ± 3% of theoretical expectations, and a ten-fold increase in propagation delay cuts a miner’s reward roughly in half despite equal hash power. Hornet delivers protocol-truth execution, but at noticeably higher CPU, memory and bandwidth cost than the simulators. All scripts, Docker files and raw logs are released under an open license, providing a one-click baseline for future benchmarking of new distributed-ledger technologies.