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Microcomputations as Micropayments in Web-based Services

Published: 01 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new micropayment model for nonspecialized commodity web-services based on microcomputations. In our model, a user that wishes to access online content (offered by a website) does not need to register or pay to access the website; instead, he will accept to run microcomputations on behalf of the service provider in exchange for access to the content. These microcomputations can, for example, support ongoing computing projects that have clear social benefits (e.g., projects relating to medical research) or can contribute towards commercial computing projects. We analyze the security and privacy of our proposal and we show that it preserves the privacy of users. We argue that this micropayment model is economically and technically viable and that it can be integrated in existing distributed computing frameworks (e.g., the BOINC platform). In this respect, we implement a prototype of a system based on our model and we deploy our prototype on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate its performance and usability given a large number of users. Our results show that our proposed scheme does not affect the browsing experience of users and is likely to be used by a non-trivial proportion of users. Finally, we empirically show that our scheme incurs comparable bandwidth and CPU consumption to the resource usage incurred by online advertisements featured in popular websites.

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  • (2019)Gray Computing: A Framework for Computing with Background JavaScript TasksIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.277281245:2(171-193)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 13, Issue 3
May 2014
97 pages
ISSN:1533-5399
EISSN:1557-6051
DOI:10.1145/2630790
  • Editor:
  • Munindar P. Singh
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 May 2014
Accepted: 01 January 2014
Revised: 01 January 2014
Received: 01 March 2013
Published in TOIT Volume 13, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Distributed computing
  2. Monetization
  3. microcomputations
  4. micropayments
  5. privacy

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  • (2019)Gray Computing: A Framework for Computing with Background JavaScript TasksIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.277281245:2(171-193)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019

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