Fair and Private Bitcoin Rewards: Incentivizing Participation in Crowd-Sensing Applications

Abstract

In this work we develop a rewarding framework that can be used as a building block in crowd-sensing applications. Our protocol allows users to submit data and obtain Bitcoin payments in a privacy-preserving manner, preventing curious providers from linking the data or the payments back to the user. At the same time, we thwart malicious user behavior such as double-redeeming attempts where a user tries to obtain rewards for multiple submissions of the same data. More importantly, we ensure the fairness of the exchange; by relying on the Blockchain, we eliminate the trust placed on third parties in traditional fair exchange protocols. Finally, our system is highly efficient as most of the protocol steps do not utilize the Blockchain network. When they do, we only rely on simple Bitcoin transactions as opposed to prior works that are based on the use of highly complex smart contracts.