BlockBill : The Blockchain-Powered Paperless Billing Solution
In this use case of bills , buyers shall always have the option to return the purchase for whatever reason . On the other hand , there could be billing errors . The bill needs to be updated in case of such a discrepancy or a refund / return scenario . Our solution permits this possibility . The customer can request a review by clicking on the “ Review Bill ” option on the bill of their choice from their dashboard . The Vendor will receive the request on their dashboard and can make the changes accordingly by updating the necessary information and generating a new block . This new bill will also contain the hash of the original unmodified bill as a reference .
In our solution , during the registration of vendors and users , our system has access to records that provide their addresses , billed items , bill amounts , etc . with full detail basis . To accommodate the tax authorities , insurance companies , and service agencies for appropriate products and regulators , we have to create these user categories besides the already existing vendors and buyers ’ categories . These categories would be given permissions as appropriate with respect to their profiles . Thus , our current implementation has the required interface to realize these user categories and associated use-cases .
Blockbill , being based on blockchain , inherits performance traits associated with blockchain . The blockchain-based solutions can be evaluated to assess their efficiency , effectiveness , and quality , and identify venues for improvement . This evaluation can be carried in the context of performance parameters [ 30 ], [ 31 ], such as : Consensus mechanism , Energy consumption , Latency , Network size , Scalability , Security and Transaction fees . It should be noted that not all these parameters are disjoint .
Furthermore , depending on the use case and the specific instance of the blockchain fabric used to realize the solution , not all parameters need to be considered . For instance , in the context of crypto-currency systems , since “ No double spending ” is an essential requirement , all the earlier listed parameters remain important . However , in the case of our Blockbill , there are different use-cases with varying occurrence frequency . For instance , the most frequent use-case is “ Bill generation for the purchase ,” while the less frequent one is that of “ Return of product ” use-case . For the former use-case , Latency and / or Consensus are not important , while the latter case involves Latency . However , it is to be noted that we can ignore those performance parameters that are significant only with regard to the low-frequency use-cases . The National Retail Federation ( NRF ) reports [ 32 ], [ 33 ] that on average the return merchandise amounts to about 10 % of the total sales .
Currently , Blockbill is based on the NEAR blockchain , which finalizes 100,000 transactions per second . The cost per transaction amounts to US $ 0.01 i . e . 1 US Cent . The idea is to have our own NEAR installation on a dedicated blockchain-network that is customized for our use-case . Even
Journal of Innovation 105