Building Petitions on Public Blockchains: From Requirements to Implementations

Abstract

Petitions are popular among internet users to share their opinions on various topics. However, most petitions are created and signed on few central platforms that retain control over content, participation and the technical implementation.Public Blockchains have the potential to increase trust in petition results, as their workings are transparent and the integrity of processed data is verifiable by anyone. We define the scope of petitions and their relationship to voting systems and present several approaches, ranging from Ethereum addressbased authentication and zero-knowledge proofs to pseudonymous signatures.These approaches are compared in terms of functional and security properties, cost and user requirements. Using the proposed methods, users can sign petitions based on their identity such that they are both universally verifiable and unique, without allowing attackers to infer their identities. We evaluate all schemes by deploying them to Ethereum-based blockchains and find that some of them fulfill all stated requirements and are practically usable on Layer 2 networks.