Paper 2017/444

CrowdBC: A Blockchain-based Decentralized Framework for Crowdsourcing

Ming Li, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang, Wei Lu,Yue Zhang, Lin Hou, Jianan Liu

Abstract

Crowdsourcing systems which utilize the human intelligence to solve complex tasks have gained considerable interest and adoption in recent years. However, the majority of existing crowdsourcing systems rely on central servers, which are subject to the weaknesses of traditional trust-based model such as single point of failure and privacy disclosure. In addition, high service fees from the crowdsourcing platform may hinder the development of crowdsourcing. How to address these potential issues has both research and substantial value. In this paper, we conceptualize a blockchain-based decentralized framework for crowdsourcing named CrowdBC, in which a requester’s task can be solved by a crowd of workers without relying on any third trusted institution, users’ privacy can be guaranteed and only low transaction fees are required. In particular, we introduce the architecture of our proposed framework, based on which we give a concrete scheme. We further implement a software prototype on Ethereum with real-world dataset. Experiment results show the validity and effectiveness of our proposed crowdsourcing system.

Note: Some minor issues are addressed.