Decentralized Review System for Transparent and Accountable Governance
Going forward , once Web3 becomes a reality , there would be a new standard of CSS , which would mandate NOT hosting of reviews by the buyer / provider-controlled websites . Such websites would strictly be pulling the reviews hosted on a decentralized review system ( DRS ). The solution we have developed is a DRS to realize this grander future .
We characterize a review as a transaction and store that review as a transaction on the blockchain . Every review is assigned a unique identifier and timestamp , which can be used to verify its authenticity . The translation details can also be made to include geo-tags .
A decentralized review system also provides other benefits . For example , it can be designed to be transparent , where all reviews are publicly visible , allowing citizens to view each other ' s feedback and a generic assessment of the governance office they are going to visit . Additionally , it can be designed to be anonymous , where citizens can provide feedback without revealing their identities , enabling them to provide honest and unbiased feedback .
However , storing large amounts of data on the blockchain can be impractical and expensive . This is where IPFS comes in . IPFS is a decentralized storage protocol that stores multiple copies of any data in the network worldwide . This means that reviews that are bulky can be split into lean and heavy parts and that heavy portion is stored on this IPFS network , eliminating the single point of failure . Using IPFS to store reviews and the blockchain to establish trust and verifiability can provide a comprehensive solution to the issues faced by centralized review systems .
We used Solana Blockchain and IPFS to implement the Decentralized Review System . IPFS protocol stores the multimedia part of the review , while the translation recorded on the Solana holds a reference to that portion on the IPFS . The workings of Solana and IPFS are discussed below in detail .
Blockchain [ 17 ] is an emerging technology with many applications and use cases . It is a distributed and immutable ledger that is shared among all the nodes in the Blockchain network . The earliest work on Blockchain goes back to the 1980s by David Chaum [ 18 ]. Unlike a traditional database that supports Create , Read , Update , and Delete record operations , Blockchain only allows Create and Read record operations . To compensate for the Update and Delete operations , Blockchain supports consensus-based transactions , which can introduce corrections onto the previously committed transactions through new transactions with reference to the transactions being overwritten or deleted .
All transactions , after authorization , get stored by grouping into blocks and forming a chain of those blocks . Each time the network gets a new group of data , which is a collection of transactions , it creates a new block and adds it to the existing chain . A blockchain ' s power lies in the protocol used in deciding the next block and the non-feasibility of changing any block in the
Journal of Innovation 53