Abstract
The recent pandemic of novel coronavirus introduces a new challenge to balancing social welfare, the economy, and privacy while reducing contact among individuals. To reduce the reproduction rate without spoiling our economy, we need good incentive mechanisms to reduce the possibility of spreading the virus as well as good privacy enhancing techniques. Unfortunately, some of the recent approaches in contact tracing are not successful due to privacy concerns and a lack of sufficient incentive mechanisms to guide behavior instead of simply tracking infections. In this paper, we provide a design using smart contracts as an incentive mechanism with enhanced privacy of user location information. We utilize encrypted data calculated from a set of network routing information, and a plaintext equality test of a public key cryptosystem to estimate the duration one is present at the same location. By staying at the same location longer, a user can obtain greater rewards. We have implemented a proof concept of this scheme to evaluate its efficiency. We also discuss financial regulation and economic viewpoints.
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Notes
- 1.
Usage of TEE at user device is not for operation of blockchain nodes.
- 2.
One could very well stop after creating a histogram of the location distribution, but a user’s performance is less clear when viewed categorically and hence we prefer to have a derived metric that greatly simplifies the act of comparing user performance.
- 3.
The experiment was run on a mid-tier personal computer. This figure can likely be greatly reduced on higher end hardware.
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Bartholic, M., Su, J., Ushida, R., Ikeno, Y., Gu, Z., Matsuo, S. (2020). Proof of No-Work: How to Incentivize Individuals to Stay at Home. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Herrera-Joancomarti, J. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12484. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66172-4_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66172-4_25
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