The problem reTax solves

Our goal is to provide a substitute tax collection system that would help resolve the issue currently plaguing India which is mismanagement of taxes collected from the public. Rather than relying on a few powerful people to take decisions on where the taxes should be used, we present a system which would help bring the decision-making power back in the hands of common people. The project uses Ethereum and IPFS as the backbone for financial transaction and document uploads.

Working:
The web-app is made using Next.js and hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. People pay taxes according to their tax brackets which registers them as verified voters in the system. This money is collected in a smart contract pool. Politicians pass bills accompanied by the required legal documents which are uploaded to the IPFS network using a local IPFS node running on the same EC2 instance as the web-app. These bills contain plans where each plan requires some amount of money to be executed (example: A plan about the refurbishment of city hall may require 1 ETH to be transferred to the renovation company). The plans are then approved by the voters and if more than 50% of voters approve of a said plan, the plan is made ready to be finalized by the politician. Once the politician finalizes the plan, the required funds are deducted from the tax pool and directly sent to the recipient contractor.

Challenges we ran into

We were trying to implement it on a private Ethereum chain using our own genesis block on an AWS EC2 instance so that it would provide us flexibility with respect to the block mining times but we ran into some errors that would've cost us a lot of time to fix. To mitigate this, we rather shifted on over to the Rinkeby test network for this hack.

IPFS uploading using infura's node was taking some time and to fix this we hosted our own IPFS node on the AWS EC2 instance which provided us with lightning-fast upload speeds.