Atin Angrish, Benjamin Craver, Mahmud Hasan, Binil Starly
With product customization an emerging business opportunity, organizations must find ways to collaborate and enable sharing of information in an inherently trust-less network. In this paper, we propose â âFabRecâ: a decentralized approach to handle manufacturing information generated by various organizations using blockchain technology. We propose a system in which a decentralized network of manufacturing machines and computing nodes can enable automated transparency of an organizationâs capability, third party verification of such capability through a trail of past historic events and automated mechanisms to drive paperless contracts between participants using âsmart contractsâ. Our system decentralizes critical information about the manufacturer and makes it available on a peer-to-peer network composed of fiduciary nodes to ensure transparency and data provenance through a verifiable audit trail. We present a testbed platform through a combination of manufacturing machines, system-on-chip platforms and computing nodes to demonstrate mechanisms through which a consortium of disparate organizations can communicate through a decentralized network. Our prototype testbed demonstrates the value of computer code residing on a decentralized network for verification of information on the blockchain and ways in which actions can be autonomously initiated in the physical world. This paper intends to expose system elements in preparation for much larger field tests through the working prototype and discusses the future potential of blockchain for manufacturing IT.
Jing-Zhong Wang, Mengru Li, Yunhua He, Hong Li ¡ 6 authors
Crowdsensing applications utilize the pervasive smartphone users to collect large-scale sensing data efficiently. The quality of sensing data depends on the participation of highly skilled users. To motivate these skilled users to participate, they should receive enough rewards for compensating their resource consumption. Available incentive mechanisms mainly consider the truthfulness of the mechanism, but mostly ignore the issues of security and privacy caused by a âtrustfulâ center. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving blockchain incentive mechanism in crowdsensing applications, in which a cryptocurrency built on blockchains is used as a secure incentive way. High quality contributors will get their payments that are recorded in transaction blocks. The miners will verify the transaction according to the sensing data assessment criteria published by the server. As the transaction information can disclose usersâ privacy, a node cooperation verification approach is proposed to achieve$k$-anonymity privacy protection. Through theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we show the feasibility and security of our incentive mechanism.
A number of information and resource sharing systems arise and become popular with the rapid development of communication technologies and mobile smart devices. The interactions between humans and machines are intense and their synergistic reactions have attracted special attention for the reason of forming so called HumanâMachine Networks (HMN). HMNs refer to these networks where humans and machines work together to provide synergistic effects on their payoffs. Game theory, which can capture the interactions among players dexterously, has been widely used in solving various problems in HMN systems from the view of economics. In this paper, we extensively review the literature about game theoretical methods in HMNs, in particular focusing on its typical systems such as crowdsourcing, an elemental HMN and Internet of Things (IoT), a hybrid HMN, as well as Bitcoin. We propose a series of requirements to evaluate existing work. For reviewing and analyzing each system, we specify application purposes, players, strategies, game models and equilibria based on our proposed requirements. In the sequel, we identify a number of common and distinct open issues in HMNs and point out future research directions.
Haoyan Wu, Zhijie Li, Brian King, Zina Ben Miled ¡ 6 authors
Supply chains (SC) span many geographies, modes and industries and involve several phases where data flows in both directions from suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, to customers. This data flow is necessary to support critical business decisions that may impact product cost and market share. Current SC information systems are unable to provide validated, pseudo real-time shipment tracking during the distribution phase. This information is available from a single source, often the carrier, and is shared with other stakeholders on an as-needed basis. This paper introduces an independent, crowd-validated, online shipment tracking framework that complements current enterprise-based SC management solutions. The proposed framework consists of a set of private distributed ledgers and a single blockchain public ledger. Each private ledger allows the private sharing of custody events among the trading partners in a given shipment. Privacy is necessary, for example, when trading high-end products or chemical and pharmaceutical products. The second type of ledger is a blockchain public ledger. It consists of the hash code of each private event in addition to monitoring events. The latter provide an independently validated immutable record of the pseudo real-time geolocation status of the shipment from a large number of sources using commuters-sourcing.
The wisdom of the crowd is a valuable asset in todayâs society. It is not only important in predicting elections but also plays an essential role in marketing and the financial industry. Having a trustworthy source of opinion can make forecasts more accurate and markets predictable. Until now, a fundamental problem of surveys is the lack of incentives for participants to provide accurate information. Classical solutions like small monetary rewards or the chance of winning a prize are often not very attractive for participants. More attractive solutions, such as prediction markets, face the issue of illegality and are often unavailable. In this work, we present a solution that unites the advantages from classical polling and prediction markets via a customizable incentivization framework. Apart from predicting events, this framework can also be used to govern decentralized autonomous organizations.
Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider.
Public blockchain networks using proof of work (PoW)-based consensus protocols are considered as a promising platform for decentralized resource management with financial incentive mechanisms. In order to maintain a secured, universal state of the blockchain, PoW-based consensus protocols financially incentivize the nodes in the network to compete for the privilege of block generation through cryptographic puzzle solving. For rational consensus nodes, i.e., miners with limited local computational resources, offloading the computation load for PoW to the cloud/fog providers (CFPs) becomes a viable option. In this paper, we study the interaction between the CFPs and the miners in a PoW-based blockchain network using a game theoretic approach. In particular, we propose a lightweight infrastructure of the PoW-based blockchains, where the computation-intensive part of the consensus process is offloaded to the cloud/fog. We formulate the computation resource management in the blockchain consensus process as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the profit of the CFP and the utilities of the individual miners are jointly optimized. In the first stage of the game, the CFP sets the price of offered computing resource. In the second stage, the miners decide on the amount of service to purchase accordingly. We apply backward induction to analyze the subgame perfect equilibria in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For uniform pricing where the same price applies to all miners, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved by capitalizing on the variational inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.
The emerging blockchain technologies have enabled development of crypto-currencies and autonomous smart contracts that can operate in decentralized and trustless settings. Distributed autonomous organizations can be implemented using smart contracts available on the Ethereum blockchain. In this paper, we propose a distributed autonomous software organization model and its Ethereum smart contract implementation called AutonomousSoftwareOrg for providing a continuously operating virtual organization for software development communities and users. AutonomousSoftwareOrg facilitates a funding mechanism based on crypto-currencies, a decision making mechanism based on voting and record keeping for software usage citations and executions. AutonomousSoftwareOrg is deployed and tested on our local Ethereum based blockchain system (http://ebloc.cmpe.boun.edu.tr). Its Solidity language source code is available at https://github.com/ebloc/AutonomousSoftwareOrg.
Simona Ibba, Andrea Pinna, Matteo Seu, Filippo Eros Pani
A smart city is a connected system in which things produce a huge quantity of data. We focused the attention on monitoring the environment quality in urban area by means of a distributed network of small mobile sensors that are devices on the Internet of Things (IoT). Sensors produce digital measurements, useful for investigating and studying the life quality in every part of the city. In our vision, environmental data must be available by everyone and shared with citizens, but it must be unmodifiable. We propose to solve the problem of the sensors data storage and management using a disruptive technology called blockchain. The blockchain responds to the demand of availability and unchangeability and, thanks to the potentiality of smart contracts, makes us able to manage sensor information and implement a control logic. In order to develop the software based on blockchain we chose to apply the SCRUM methodology because of its capabilities of being a flexible, adaptive and iterative methodology.
In this paper, we present ethnographic data that unpacks the everyday work of some of the many infrastructuring agents who contribute to creating, sustaining and growing the Blockchain information infrastructure. We argue that this infrastructuring work takes the form of entrepreneurial actions, which are self-initiated and primarily directed at sustaining or increasing the initiator's stake in the emerging information infrastructure. These entrepreneurial actions wrestle against the affordances of the installed base of the Blockchain infrastructure, and take the shape of engaging or circumventing activities. These activities purposefully aim at either influencing or working around the enablers and constraints afforded by the Blockchain information infrastructure, as its installed base is gaining inertia. This study contributes to our understanding of the purpose of infrastructuring, seen from the perspective of heterogeneous entrepreneurial agents. It supplements existing accounts of the "when" and "how" of infrastructure, with a lens for examining the "why" of infrastructure.
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is successful, the earned rewards are appropriately split among all pool participants. Currently a dozen of different pooling strategies (i.e., methods for distributing the rewards) are in use for Bitcoin mining. We here propose a formal model of utility and social welfare for Bitcoin mining (and analogous mining systems) based on the theory of discounted expected utility, and next study pooling strategies that maximize the social welfare of miners. Our main result shows that one of the pooling strategies actually employed in practice--the so-called geometric pay pool--achieves the optimal steady-state utility for miners when its parameters are set appropriately. Our results apply not only to Bitcoin mining pools, but any other form of pooled mining or crowdsourcing computations where the participants engage in repeated random trials towards a common goal, and where "partial" solutions can be efficiently verified.
Ming Li, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang, Wei Lu ¡ 9 authors
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.
Ubiquitous sensing enabled by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies cuts across many areas of modern day living. This offers the ability to measure, infer and understand environmental indicators, from delicate ecologies and natural resources to urban environments. The proliferation of these devices in a communicating-actuating network creates the Internet of Things (IoT), wherein, sensors and actuators blend seamlessly with the environment around us, and the information is shared across platforms in order to develop a common operating picture (COP). Fuelled by the recent adaptation of a variety of enabling wireless technologies such as RFID tags and embedded sensor and actuator nodes, the IoT has stepped out of its infancy and is the the next revolutionary technology in transforming the Internet into a fully integrated Future Internet. As we move from www (static pages web) to web2 (social networking web) to web3 (ubiquitous computing web), the need for data-on-demand using sophisticated intuitive queries increases significantly. This paper presents a Cloud centric vision for worldwide implementation of Internet of Things. The key enabling technologies and application domains that are likely to drive IoT research in the near future are discussed. A Cloud implementation using Aneka, which is based on interaction of private and public Clouds is presented. We conclude our IoT vision by expanding on the need for convergence of WSN, the Internet and distributed computing directed at technological research community.
Matthias Stuermer, Gabriel Abu-Tayeh, Thomas Myrach
The modern age has heralded a shift from the industrial society, in which natural resources are crucial input factors for the economy, towards a knowledge society. To date, sustainability literature has treated knowledge-and in particular digital artifacts-mainly as a means to the end of achieving sustainable development. In this conceptual paper, we argue that digital artifacts themselves ought also to be considered as resources, which also need to be sustainable. While over-consumption is a problem facing natural resources, with sustainable digital artifacts, underproduction, and underuse are the biggest challenges. In our view, the sustainability of digital artifacts improves their potential impact on sustainable development. A theoretical foundation for digital artifacts and their ecosystem allows us to present the relevant research on digital information, knowledge management, digital goods, and innovation literature. Based on these insights, we propose ten basic conditions for sustainable digital artifacts and their ecosystem to ensure that they provide the greatest possible benefit for sustainable development. We then apply those characteristics to four exemplary cases: Linux kernel development, Bitcoin cryptocurrency, the Wikipedia project, and the Linking Open Drug Data repositories. The paper concludes with a research agenda identifying topics for sustainability scholars and information systems academics, as well as practitioners. A number of suggestions for future studies on digital sustainability are also put forward.
In this paper, we propose a digital cash system named Blockchain-LI. This is an activity-based micro-pricing system implemented on cryptocurrency technologies. Activity-based micro-pricing is a pervasive technology to influence people's behavior through economic incentives. Implementing activity-based micro-pricing based on cryptocurrency technologies enables us to solve potential technical issues of traditional implementation. The Blockchain-LI architecture adopts a hierarchical currency network containing two types of currencies. The public coin is widely prevalent and has high integrity. The private coins are low integrity digital currencies that connect to the public coin. This approach enables us to solve cryptocurrency problems including scalability and block size. However, to use Blockchain-LI as a social infrastructure system, unresolved problems remain. This paper proposes sustainability, conversion protocols, and security issues as topics for future study.
User appropriation can be immensely helpful to bootstrap emerging technologies; but how do new and lesser known technologies attract these earliest adopters? This paper investigates user appropriation of emerging computing technologies, by focusing on Bitcoin, a digital monetary system supported by a peer-to-peer network of computing devices. We conducted in-depth interviews with sixteen Bitcoin community participants in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Baltimore. We describe user appropriation in this case of Bitcoin as a sociocultural journey-from encounter, research and learning, to socialization. We contribute the concept of cultural affinities, including conceptual, contextual and social dimensions, as important mediators leading to early-stage user appropriation.
In Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), the power of the crowd, jointly with the sensing capabilities of the smartphones they wear, provides a new paradigm for data sensing. Scenarios involving user behavior or those that rely on user mobility are examples where standard sensor networks may not be suitable, and MCS provides an interesting solution. However, including human participation in sensing tasks presents numerous and unique research challenges. In this paper, we analyze three of the most important: user participation, data sensing quality and user anonymity. We tackle the three as a whole, since all of them are strongly correlated. As a result, we present PaySense, a general framework that incentivizes user participation and provides a mechanism to validate the quality of collected data based on the users' reputation. All such features are performed in a privacy-preserving way by using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Rather than a theoretical one, our framework has been implemented, and it is ready to be deployed and complement any existing MCS system.
The Internet of Things and Services (IoTS) has encouraged the development of service provisioning systems in respect to Smart City topics. Most of them are operated as heterogeneous systems which limits end customersâ access and contradicts with IoTS principles. In this paper, we discuss and develop a reference model of an interconnected service marketplace ecosystem. The prototypical implementation incorporates findings from an empirical study and lessons learned from research projects. The elaborated ecosystem enables service request roaming between different parties across system boundaries. The paper presents a feasible centralized architecture, introduces involved parties and parts of a developed message protocol. Why a contracting mechanism is indispensable for request roaming is also outlined. The modelâs feasibility is demonstrated by means of a current electric mobility use case: providing access to foreign charging infrastructure without multiple registrations. This work contributes to simplify the data exchange between service platforms to improve Smart City solutions and to support travelers with intelligent mobility applications.
Bitcoin is an innovative decentralized cryptocurrency whose core security relies on a âproof of work â procedure, which requires network participants to repeatedly compute hashes on inputs from a large search space. Finding one of the rare inputs that generates an extremely low hash value is consid-ered a successful attempt, allowing miners to approve new transactions and, in return, to collect rewards in bitcoins. This reward allocation, which provides the incentive for miners to participate, is a random process with a large vari-ance. Miners who desire a steady income thus often par-ticipate in mining pools that divide among their members the earned rewards, and reduce this variance. Mining pools are slightly better at coordinating participants due to lower-latency communication, a fact which implies that they man-age to collect slightly higher rewards. We examine dynamics of pooled mining and the rewards that pools manage to collect, and use cooperative game the-oretic tools to analyze how pool members may share these rewards. We show that for some network parameters, es-pecially under high transaction loads, it is difficult or even impossible to distribute rewards in a stable way: some par-ticipants are always incentivized to switch between pools.