The recent pandemic of novel coronavirus produces a new challenge to balance social welfare, economy and privacy without any contact among citizens. To reduce the reproduction rate without spoiling our economy, we need good incentive mechanisms to reduce the possibil- ity of spreading the virus as well as good privacy enhancing techniques. Unfortunately, some of recent approaches like contact tracing are not successful due to lack of sufficient incentive mechanisms due to privacy concern. In this paper, we provide a design using smart contracts as an incentive mechanism with enhancing privacy of user location at a specific time. We utilize encrypted data calculated from a set of network routing information, and plaintext equality test of public key cryptosystem to estimate the time duration of staying at the same place. 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.
@inproceedings{BSUIGM2020,
author = {Bartholic, Michael and Su, Jianan and Ushida, Ryosuke and Ikeno, Yusuke and Gu, Zhengrong and Matsuo, Shinichiro},
booktitle = {International Workshop on
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT)},
title = {{Proof of No-Work: How to Incentivize Individuals to Stay at Home}},
year = {2020}
}