I made this comment in the thread of this story.
Probably a very unpopular thing to say: It would be interesting to see a middleman-free, decentralized version of Lyft/Uber where payments and ride-hailing are done with crypto and blockchain/smart contracts, driver ID’s using using DID’s, anonymized on-chain using homomorphic encryption. The hardest problem that I forsee with that tech is with dispute resolution. The idea stems from the opinion that the gig economy is great but the real problem (in matters not related to conflict resolution) is that the middleman takes a huge cut of the fare in exchange for doing almost nothing.
I was hoping that we could have a discussion about the pro’s and cons of a crypto implementation of ride-sharing apps like Lyft and Uber.
For me, I don’t think we’ll see any implementation of this idea anytime soon because there are a lot of near-impossible issues for a decentralized organization to deal with in regards to conflict resolution.
However from my perspective, almost all other aspects of this tech seem to benefit from the elimination of a greedy middleman that does nothing other than connect two independent parties (one looking to get hired to drive and the other looking to get a ride in exchange for money).
When you say ‘crypto’, do you mean cryptocurrency or an application of blockchain in a non-currency role?
I’m genuinely intrigued by the idea because I hate hate hate unnecessary middlepersons. I am sincerely interested how crypto/blockchain would help achieve this worthy goal.
If you can feasibly think of a way to effectively decentralize computation in order to create incentives for server owners to run a public network without involving crypto, I am all ears. If not, of course I am talking about cryptocurrency.
I have committed a lot of thought on this topic and, IMO, crypto is currently the only way to run a decentralized, open source platform where the nodes have an incentive to behave honestly.
Lemmy is a great case in point. On a long enough timeline, instance operators will need to secure funding or they will need to shut down. If they had some kind of openly-auditable incentive mechanism with rewards for longevity and reliability, it would be the best possible way to keep the system self-sustaining, uncorrupted by external financial influence, censorship-free, and reliable. *Even if Lemmy were considered a public good, funded by governments, even that would introduce a tendency toward censorship which might not exist if you compared it with a crypto-based system. *
ps. if you think I am crazy for thinking about this stuff in regards to lemmy/kbin right now, have a look at kbin’s source code.
pps. I am psyched to have these kinds of discussions. Thanks for the engagement and keep it going. It’s fascinating to me.
To play devil’s advocate, the biggest issues I can currently find with this idea:
- latency (you’d need something with super fast finality which seems like a hydra head if this were a Cardano implementation)
- you’d probably need some semblance of an oracle system to broadcast ride-hailing, etc
- DID’s don’t exist in the capacity you’d need
- conflict resolution
I haven’t even watched the unveiling yet, much less read any white papers on it, but from what little I know it kind of sounds like Veilid is the perfect answer for this?
Yeah I saw that and agree to the extent that I understand that technology at the moment. I don’t know enough about it at the moment but it seems to be some sort of p2p tech that uses homomorphic encryption.
It could be useful indeed but I’d still imagine some sort of public ledger also being involved since things could get VERY sketchy at the drop of a hat when you have two anonymous parties interacting in the real world without some sort of authority to exact punishment/disclosure when bad things do eventually happen.
