Blockchain and Mobile Payment: Assessment on Privacy and Usability and a Scheme for Enhancement

Blockchain is a new paradigm to realize payment without a single Trusted-Third-Party. The technology exploits cryptography to secure all the transactions that are available to participating nodes for validation via distributed consensus algorithms. Blockchain-based architectures for mobile payment face challenges like transaction privacy and performance issues. We analyze these architectures and assess the privacy issues and the performance in the real world. Then, we propose a payment scheme to guarantee the privacy of the transactions with discussions on tricks to improve the performance. We study the feasibility of implementation of the proposed scheme, both on public and consortium Blockchains. The payment scheme ensures that a participating node has access to only a part of the meaningful data of a transaction. The expected performance with Hyperledger Blockchain (with less than 16 participating nodes) is more than 1000 TPS. We indicate updates to decrease the duration of a transaction from 15 S to less than 1 S with public Ethereum Blockchain.