Reportcoin: A Novel Blockchain-Based Incentive Anonymous Reporting System

Abstract

With the widespread popularity of Internet-enabled devices, mobile users can request and receive messages anytime and anywhere, which facilitates information feedback for smart city management. However, few people are willing to reflect or report some violations of law and discipline around them, and more people choose to ignore. In general, there are two major reasons for this phenomenon. First, reporting with a real name is highly recommended, but it is difficult to send trusted and reliable reporting messages without revealing the reporter's identity. Second, generally no benefit, users usually lack the motivation to report due to worrying about being retaliated. In this paper, we propose an effective anonymous reporting system called ReportCoin, a novel Blockchain-based incentive anonymous reporting system. ReportCoin guarantees user identity privacy and reporting message reliability throughout the reporting process. On the one hand, ReportCoin allows nondeterministic mobile users to vote the reporting by signing and to send anonymous announcements in the non-fully trusted network. On the other hand, ReportCoin motivates users with incentives to report without worrying about the disclosure of identity information to be retaliated. Meanwhile, account information and transaction records in ReportCoin are open, transparent, and tamper-resistant. The theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results show that ReportCoin is efficient and practical.

Keywords

• Smart city
• anonymity
• incentive mechanism
• reliability
• blockchain