Performance Analysis of Trustworthy Online Review System using Blockchain

Abstract

Today, the online review system cannot fully support the business since there are fraudulent activities inside. The companies that get low score reviews are induced to raise their score for the market competition capability by paying to the platform for deleting or editing the posted reviews. Moreover, the automatic filtration system of a platform removes some reviews without the awareness of the users. The low transparency platform causes low credibility toward the reviews. Blockchain technology provides exceptionally high transparency since every action can be traced publicly. However, there are some tradeoffs that need to be considered, such as cost and response time. This work tends to find the potential of using Blockchain technology in the online review system by testing four implementation approaches of the Ethereum Smart Contract. The result illustrates that using IPFS to store the data is a practical way of reducing transaction costs. Besides, preventing using Smart Contract states can significantly reduce costs too. The response time for using the Blockchain and IPFS system is slower than the centralized system. However, posting a review does not need a fast response. Thus, it is worthy of trading response time with transparency and cost. In the business view, the review posting with cost causes more difficulty to generate fake reviews. Moreover, there are other advantages over the centralized system, such as the reward system, bogus review voting, and global database. Thus, credibility improvement for a consumer online review system is a potential application of Blockchain technology.