Survey of Crowdsourcing Applications in Blockchain Systems

Abstract

Blockchain technology can be extensively applied in diverse services,ranging from online micro-payment,supply chain tracking,digital forensics,health-care record sharing to insurance payment.Extending the technology to the crowdsourcing,we can obtain a verifiable and traceable crowdsourcing systems.Emerging research in crowdsourcing applications exploits blockchain technology to optimize the task assignment and reward payment using various consensus protocols and blockchain techniques,which can provide additional security,automatic,verifiable and traceable crowdsourcing platforms.In this paper,we conduct a systematic survey of the key components of crowdsourcing blockchain and compare a number of popular blockchain applications.In particular,we first give an architecture overview of popular crowdsourcing-blockchain systems by analyzing their network structures and protocols.Then,we discuss variant consensus protocols for crowdsourcing blockchains,and make comparisons among different consensus algorithms.Finally,we look forward to the future research problems in this field,and provide a large number of references.

Keywords

• blockchain|crowdsourcing|privacy protection|consensus protocols