CrowdBC: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Framework for Crowdsourcing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 30; no. 6; pp. 1251 - 1266
• Main Authors: Li, Ming, Weng, Jian, Yang, Anjia, Lu, Wei, Zhang, Yue, Hou, Lin, Liu, Jia-Nan, Xiang, Yang, Deng, Robert H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Blockchain; Computer crime; Crowdsourcing; Cryptography; Cybersecurity; Data privacy; Decentralized framework; Denial of service attacks; Intelligence; smart contract; Task analysis; Task complexity
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2018.2881735

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. They are also vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks due to malicious users involvement. 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 public test network with real-world dataset. Experiment results show the feasibility, usability, and scalability of our proposed crowdsourcing system.