Using cryptocurrency along with smart contracts to create a social platform

Abstract

The common problem in this era, is that the companies or websites which are being utilized by the consumers, or rather the public, have been providing services solely for their own business growths and profits. Which ideally, leaves the customers to limited resources, based on the amount they pay. The community related apps or websites these days, aren’t about contributing and benefitting from or to the community. It’s about entirely receiving the benefits. Hence the motivation towards this research component is that, to create a platform which is entirely decentralized, and any benefits and contributions will be made by the users themselves. The benefits to the customer base would be given in the form of a digital currency. Existing applications which are out there in the world, are pretty much storing the user’s personal data, and holding the ownership of those data. These data are being stored in servers which are spread across the globe, which could be either owned by Google or Apple or Microsoft. The concept of SMART Contract will be utilized as the middleman between all the consumers or users and the application, in order to make sure that the appropriate user is given the relevant privileges to gain or contribute from or to the community. So that the consensus problem is being rectified and makes sure that there won’t be any frauds or manipulations within the community. Having a decentralized application would make sure that the users of the application are aware that their personal information can only be altered by themselves, not by anyone else. So as a proof of study, in order to prove that applications can be built as decentralized so that only the users will be benefited with the services. Along with the increase of population here in Sri Lanka, most of the people do travel by using the public transport, ie. Train, Bus. As an example, most of the people are still struggling to figure out the daily schedule (departure and arrival) and the time duration for a whole journey of a train, which would ideally make every single public’s daily plans even worse. Since the people are quite unsure of the time, when the train would leave or arrive from or to a station, they will have to be at the station way early than normal in order to make sure that they catch the train or either they might get late to reach a destination. Hence, it’s easy for people, if they’re aware well ahead of this, they can decide accordingly. In order to do that, I’m trying to build up a community platform where the users are the public (contributors + non-contributors), and they can contribute to the community in order to earn themselves some benefits from the application. So the platform would be using the Ethereum's Ether, which is a cryptocurrency just like Bitcoin, as the benefit for the user and the core of this platform would be utilizing the concept of Smart Contract which relies on the abstraction of Blockchain which is a decentralized chain which keeps the track of the relevant information of all the users and their relative tokens within the network.