BIT: A Blockchain Integrated Time Banking System for Community Exchange Economy

Abstract

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data technologies are reshaping the global economy. The community currency network is receiving more attention through enhancing social ties within a community. As the most popular type of community currency, Time Banking (TB) is a generalized community exchange economy, which uses the time to evaluate each participant’s contributions on the same scale rather than any equivalence with the official national currency. TB is a noble idea with the potential to improve the quality of life through prosocial, reciprocally beneficial activities among community members. However, it also brings new concerns about security and trust issues. Inspired by blockchain and smart contract, this paper introduces a Blockchain Integrated Timebanking (BIT) system to secure a decentralized community exchange economy. In BIT system, service providers and recipients can securely exchange effort through a self-executing smart contract without relying on a third-party trust authority. The blockchain network ensures immutability, auditability, and traceability of all data and service transactions recorded on the distributed ledger. A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented and tested on a private Ethereum network. The experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed BIT to provide decentralized community service exchanges with limited computation overhead and network latency.