This feels like an entertaining distraction by someone who massively underestimates their need to provide support to both drivers and customers.
Uber's GPS mapping soloution doesn't work as magically as it needs to. Things change pretty quickly there. I don't think this could succeed without traditional support infrastructure.
Also, block chain updates over mobile? What is the data plan of those drivers going to look like?
Assuming that it is even necessary to use ethereum for a distributed uber -- I see no need for the driver to maintain a copy of the blockchain, and certainly not in the vehicle. Groups of drivers who trust each other IRL could, for example, cooperate to finance a single full node and then make calls to that service to verify payment.
Presumably, drivers could also use third-party mapping software / services, dispatchers, whatever aspects of the biz are not handled by the decentralized protocol.
What is a cryptocurrency pool? Are you thinking of a mining pool? No, there would be no need for that. Why would a taxi driver need to mine bitcoin?
Let's ignore that taxi drivers could avoid using any cryptocurrency. It's possible to have the ride hailing and rating systems done without bitcoin.
If we assume that bitcoin or a clone is the right network to use for the dispatch and ratings systems, then someone the taxi driver trusts has to run wallet software to verify that transactions are valid. It might be a good idea for them to have their own node for certain functions as well.
Wallet and node software could be run very cheaply in the taxi driver's home, or even in a project shared between drivers. So the objection about mobile bandwidth is easily overcome.
I'm not entire sure many of the Uber drivers realized they are just a temporary stopgap until self driving cars are a reality. Uber I'm sure will be one of the first, if not the first, company to have a massive fleet of self driving cars.
At that point their costs will be so low they'll be able to undercut anyone still using human drivers.
They are a stopgap in a similar way McDonald's employees are stopgaps until full automation. It's a long way out; and, even if it is closer than expected, that type of employee hasn't exactly invested a lot of their life into training for the job so it's not like they are getting screwed.
I suspect Uber will actually beat McDonald's to automation. I tried to find any evidence that McDonald's in trying to automate their restaurants, and all I could find was a joke news article.
Looking at mcdonnalds doing automation is just one avenue restaurant automation will happen.It's just as likely that some other company/startup will lead, for example momentum machines' burger robot(assuming not vaporware) or eatsa's restaurant model.
This could be something worth fully automating -- they have a limited number of options on the menu, and a less-limited but still defined number of permutations on those options. That problem space may be small enough for converting text-to-speech. The downside is that you'd still have to have someone on-call to try to rework any order statements the system has a low reliability score on.
McDonalds definitely invests in automation, but the goal isn't to replace humans entirely. Uber also has much higher marginal labor costs than McDonalds does and would benefit a lot more from automation.
Uber gets to use a massive amount of physical assets without any investment in those assets. I imagine their future with automation is the same. No way they want to buy their own fleets of cars, they will just let you lend them your car when you don't use it.
Maybe (surely) there will be a squeeze on fees, but automation should move the income from active to semi passive for car owners.
Automation is not always the most convenient thing. Think about self-checkout or pumping your own gas at a gas station.
Wouldn't it be better for the customer to have someone do the drudgery for them?
Even in the context of websites, some companies have generic FAQ instead of a real customer support team, which is not a good experience.
Do you also want to go to the kitchen and start bringing your own food and drinks? Getting up a few times, going there and asking if it's done. Imagine if you have dozens of people/kids running around getting food, maybe spilling it on the floor in the process, bothering people in the kitchen etc.
Are you better at scanning items and handling errors than someone who's been doing it for years? The same applies to waiters, cooks etc.
Self-checkout can be extremely convenient if it's done with a handheld scanner as you shop, as my local supermarket does. I can walk into the store with my backpack, fill it with groceries, see how much I'm spending (and whether discounts have processed properly) and then pay in a few seconds at the exit. The only minor hassle is if I'm buying alcohol I have to wait for someone to verify my age.
And if I spend less than £20, I can even use contactless payment. Unfortunately the current system still requires a few steps to pay, but theoretically I could just beep my card and walk out.
>or pumping your own gas at a gas station.
Because they haven't really automated anything but the payment. If you could drive up and have a robot arm fill your car, it would be very convenient.
Uber drivers are investing, though - they are taking out loans to acquire cars appropriate to Uber's needs, and then paying to maintain that car. They're more like McDonalds franchise operators than McDonalds employees.
They might drop in value a lot when driverless technology goes mainstream. If the supply of sedans is the same but the demand is way less because driverless cars don't need to be wasted sitting parked 90%+ of their existence, that could make used cars way cheaper for a while.
Uber drivers are likely to accrue higher than normal mileage on those vehicles, which would lead to faster depreciation.
Loan payoff is usually gradual, so I'd imagine most of them from day 1 are underwater as far as what they owe and what the car would sell for on an open market.
Market similarly discounts used taxicabs, used police vehicles and anything that's re-sold by car rental places - such vehicles have higher mileage and are more likely to have been abused.
Hmm, that's an interesting thought. How to evaluate it?
It depends on (1) how long from now you estimate cab driving may be obsolete, (2) how long the useful life of your car for cab purposes is, and (3) how driverless technology will change what the resale value of the car at its end of for-hire life otherwise would have been.
Uber requires fairly newish cars (not sure how reliable this link is, but according to http://www.idrivewithuber.com/uber-car-requirements/ it varies by type and area quite a bit from around 5 to 15 years) so if the car's useful life will only be 5 years (such as in NYC) and you estimate there's still around that much time or more left before drivers can be replaced, then it doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if your car's useful life is more like 15 years, you could be stuck with a useless asset. Maybe a driver/owner can also titrate the risk here by buying an already older car?
The other question is how widespread driverless technology would affect the resale value of these cars. Can a driver/owner just sell their car when they lose their job? On the one hand, for privately owned passenger cars, it's hard to imagine the resale value not being reduced, when car utilization rates can increase dramatically (right now a privately owned passenger car spends almost all its time parked, doing nothing useful for anyone).
On the other hand, for-hire vehicles (well, medallion cabs in NYC anyway, not sure how this compares elsewhere) already have utilization rates close to 100% (they're constantly being rented out to different drivers and are only off the streets when they're being maintained), so IF driverless technology is cheap to retrofit to these older cars, they should hold their value. ...And on the other other hand, right now once a for-hire vehicle can't be used as a cab, at least it can be resold as a private passenger vehicle. If private passenger vehicles are much cheaper because the demand is much lower due to much higher utilization, that stops being a good option. In that case, all you can really do is get as cheap a car as you can now, because it's going to have very little resale value after driverless technology hits.
Finally, a driver can rent a car. There are businesses specifically to do this. The risk is then shifted to the rental business (though presumably they charge appropriately for that). Yellow medallion cabs in NYC are almost all done this way, not sure what percentage of ubers are rented versus owned-by-the-driver.
Anyway, maybe the bigger risk is not the investment in the car, but the investment of time. If you are spending your whole workday driving for several years, you are getting very good at driving, and not getting good at any skill that will have market value after driving is automated. And even if there are any marketable skills that are related to driving (eg, let's pretend that driverless technology can't do CDL driving at first, or that a good cabbie can pick up airplane piloting quicker than average -- just silly examples), all the other displaced cab drivers will be chasing the same options. I think the more expensive asset at risk is the driver's skill and time than the car.
Automated cars still require drivers, though. Yeah, sober people could take an automated uber, but drunk people (a lot of people taking ubers) would still need a driver.
What? As designed and when they arrive they do not need drivers. When these cars arrive the allure of completely passive ridership will be so strong that no regulation will stand in the way.
Uber was not a leader in SDCs, at least before acquiring CMUs robolab, and Uber doesnt actually own any fleet whatsoever. So I don't understand the common narrative that uber will own transportation with an SDC fleet. What I see is a company that excels at market expansion and contractor growth, pre-announcing a major pivot years in advance.
It is equally or more likely, given the history of innovation, that a brand new company will win that space instead.
Travis, the CEO of Uber has already told Elon Musk he'll purchase $500 million in self driving teslas' if available by 2020. Of course that's not anything real, it'll be interesting to see if Uber moves into owning a fleet of SDC's or jsut remaining as the middle man. If they only remain middleman, their market position could easily be at risk by the companies who own the fleets. Uber would become a 'sharecropper'.
A more likely approach would be shared vehicles owned by groups of individuals/communities. A community neighborhood could own say 10 SDCs, which would have a scheduling platform and such that would effectively remove Uber from the equation altogether. I see individual car ownership dropping significantly and moving towards 'pay as you use' type service, where the car is just summoned to you. The owner, whether it's a company or group of individuals, would own the market there.
By that thought, the only way I see Uber lasting long, long-term is by offering a "fleet as a service" type deal, where any city/community/group could purchase it and split payments by usage.
Self-driving cars are not driving themselves, they are driven by algorithms. The problem is that cars then become prisons on wheels. Think about it - since you pay with a debit/credit card, your identity is known when you enter a car. You can then be driven directly to a police station and you can't escape, because the whole thing is controlled by centralized machines. Just look at what's happening to these people in China who are mysteriously disappearing. Vehicles driven by algorithms are the best tool for eliminating protesters, political enemies etc.
I'm saying government will do it with the help of Uber. Just like they spy on people with the help of FB, Google etc. It's already happening with data.
Imagine you have those cars in China. Government just orders some company to spy on its users and then when certain people enters those cars, they will be steered towards some location where they can be arrested/tortured/killed, because they are enemies of the state. They can't get out of the car, because the locks are also controlled by algorithms.
Who knows, maybe they can release some poisonous gas while the person is inside of a car.
Many possibilities are there. Governments are getting much more powerful, while the average homo sapiens is the same like when there was no government.
I'm not entirely sure you realize that no one wanted to grow up to be an Uber driver. Driving for Uber is a stopgap until guaranteed minimum income is a reality.
I love the thought behind this. The biggest threat to Uber is not Lyft or taxis or any competitors, but the emergence of a decentralized, p2p ridesharing platform. Ridesharing companies already call themselves "p2p" but that's a farce. There is nothing p2p about a single $XXX billion corporation controlling millions of rides.
In the Uber/Driver relationship, it seems at first glance that Uber has all the power. But in fact, the drivers have far more leverage. A single driver can drive for multiple apps, and in fact a significant percentage of the drivers I meet are simultaneously using Uber and Lyft.
Currently drivers using multiple platforms are pretty much only using Uber and/or Lyft. There is no third competitor. But if one emerges, especially with superior driver incentives, drivers will use it, even before any riders are on the platform. Even if demand on a new app is sparse, drivers have no reason not to download it and run it on their phone alongside Uber and Lyft. In the meantime while they wait for supply to grow, they can just continue using Uber and Lyft. But if this "third competitor" offers far greater incentives than Uber and Lyft, then once it's supply side achieves parity with its demand side, drivers will prefer it to Uber and Lyft.
So what does a "third competitor" look like to Uber or Lyft? It looks like a company (or something else!!) that gives 95% or more of revenue to its drivers, i.e. operates on minimal margins.
What are the requirements of a true p2p ridesharing platform?
--
- Bare minimum dependency on centralized third party resources
- Decentralized reputation and dispute resolution protocols
- Decentralized payment system, possibly involving an auction model
- Equilibrium of supply and demand
- Legal compliance without a dependency on a centralized market maker
--
No technological barrier exists to any of these requirements.
The most difficult aspect of a p2p ride sharing platform would be legal compliance. How do riders vet drivers, and how do drivers insure themselves? Perhaps the solution is a third party, uninvested in the ridesharing platform, that controls the reputation, dispute resolution, and insurance system. Asking the ridesharing platform to carry those responsibilities will only result in bloat and overhead costs that cut into the margins of drivers. Whereas if a third party manages legal compliance, drivers can price the cost of it into their own driving services, instead of the platform "passing down" the cost to drivers (and exaggerating its magnitude).
The second most difficult aspect would be bootstrapping supply and demand. The supply side is relatively easy, as long as the driver onboarding cost is low. The demand side is more difficult, because people trust Uber and Lyft. Building that trust in a decentralized system would not be easy, especially without legal compliance.
I challenge someone to create the Napster of ridesharing. No central servers allowed, mobile clients only, no financial overhead per transaction. The next step would be to create the trusted third party responsible for legal compliance.
A p2p platform that achieves supply/demand parity and solves the legal compliance problem will destroy Uber and Lyft, because the centralized costs of a p2p platform are zero. The drivers price their own services and have incentive to find the most economically efficient legal compliance. Therefore prices are lower than Uber and Lyft, so ultimately people will prefer p2p over centralized.
sidenote: I'm from the Portsmouth area. If anyone at arcade city is reading this, reach out! :)
Yeah, except Email and Jabber/XMPP are decentralized answers to Facebook and Google Hangouts.
Catch-call centralized solutions move faster than decentralized standards. Furthermore, decentralized standards don't make money. Ray Tomlinson (inventor of SMTP, the email protocol) isn't filthy rich, and yet everyone uses it.
So without the money incentive, and with the slow standards process (RFC is the closest to a "standardization" process for the internet)
Besides, everyone just uses Gmail anyway, centralizing into a single, catch-all platform for convenience. Decentralization may be good for people in general, but it seems like a terrible business move.
Maybe the business opportunity is in the third party legal compliance system. A viable business could build out a solution that works across platforms, including Uber and Lyft, and then once enough drivers are using it, they could release an open source, decentralized ridesharing app that allows flexible pricing and higher profits for drivers than the centralized model.
Its core business value would be the facilitation of legal compliance. The p2p ridesharing app would simply be another reason for drivers to use the compliance platform.
Uhhh what? Blockchain blockchain blockchain! And uber!
How in the world are these connected. He's presenting it like its this obvious thing that needs to be connected when it's not clear at all why any blockchain needs to be involved.
What about transaction latency, driver/passenger reputations and ratings, local legal compliance, payment for auxiliary services like maps and point-to-point navigation? All those things sound like they'd be worse off.
The end benefit to the consumer being monopoly prevention isn't likely to outweigh the service guarantees of a centralized service.
Yes, but I'd ideally go to a licensed, brick-and-mortar store for the reputation and reliability over either eBay or Craigslist, if it weren't for the prices and availability of items. My point is that the benefits of centralized, non-blockchain solutions can outweigh what you lose when you go decentralized, and that's something that should be questioned of every new blockchain application.
Why is there always a highly up-voted comment in every thread that expresses befuddlement at the utility of the blockchain? I thought HN was all about forward thinking and experimental ideas, instead of throwing up hands in ignorance.
Admittedly, the article is light on technical details, but if you understand how blockchain technology works, you could easily deduce that a likely use case for this would be a service for connecting drivers to passengers without a middleman and without the regulatory burden that often prevents these services from proliferating in certain markets. A more fleshed out general case of a decentralized marketplace is OpenBazaar, which creates a marketplace with no middleman that can't be taken down.
There is no reason a blockchain based app couldn't be implemented. Whether this guy is actually on the right path or not is hard to say based on the article.
> There is no reason a blockchain based app couldn't be implemented.
I don't think anyone is doubting this bit. It's the overwhelming current trend of forcing everything onto the blockchain, whether it improves the application or not. The interesting questions (frequently not answered) revolve around why one should do this.
To me, the supposed benefit of using blockchain was so obvious as not to require stating: Removal of any central authority over connecting customers to service providers. And you might not want Uber tracking your travels, for example.
There are good arguments for centralization, too. Not saying the blockchain argument win out. Just saying, the benefits are the same as for every other blockchain application, and well understood.
The presence of both "so obvious as not to require stating" and "Not saying the blockchain argument win out" suggests that it's probably not as obvious as it seems. :)
The whole system wouldn't have to sit on the blockchain - only the parts that are needed to put out a request. The only part that would need some thought is the initial location. One option would be to put out a general location, within 10 miles, then only give exact location to those who request it and have a proven record of being good drivers. That's another problem as well - how do you create a ratings system on the blockchain that can't be manipulated? Perhaps a page-rank style algorithm could do that.
Decentralized uber is a great idea, and I optimistically look forward to a viable implementation...maybe in the next 20 years. I'm not sure that we necessarily need bitcoin or similar software to do this, however. There would need to be some PGP-based identity system and a way to associate driver and passenger reviews with those identities, as well. Ideally identities could be registered in a distributed filesystem -- maybe ethereum works for that, but I also see no reason this couldn't be done in a less costly way. Drivers and passengers could confirm payment and publish reviews based on PGP-signed receipts. Payment could be handled in the usual manner, and I see relatively small benefits to making that verifiable through bitcoin.
We may not need bitcoin or ethereum to create a decentralized system, but do you have suggestions for better alternatives? Until then, we've got the blockchain as our tool for exploring generalized decentralized computing.
1) open source hailing app or dispatcher
2) rating system with identities
For the hailing or dispatcher, we don't need bitcoin but it may be useful if there is abuse to impose some cost on hails (e.g., uber employees generating fake hails, haha).
For the rating and identity, we can use a GPG web of trust.
How do you prevent a local government from shutting down whomever is running this open source hailing system? What happens when this person no longer wants to spend money running a hailing server?
The key is that the taxi drivers are running the hailing system, it is a tool for an already-licensed driver. There is no company coordinating the activities of "independent contractors". If someone tries to own this network, and exploit rent from it as a business opportunity, then they could run into the same regulatory issues as Uber.
This is great ! Not perfect probably right now but none the less a great start. I was talking about something like this a few weeks back and thought it would be in next few years I see a similar product. But it has just been weeks since that discussion. I truly believe that side chain has answer to such open solutions and I am very excited to see things being built.
This is really cool. There is very little technical details in the article but I gather they already got a system in place, it's using etherium, it's decenralized, and the people behind it have been uber and lyft drivers.
Building out both sides of a two-sided market is extremely hard. While this decentralized system might be appealing to drivers, Uber and Lyft have created such a great experience for riders, that I don't see a compelling reason for riders to move to this system -- even if moving to this system is as easy as downloading Arcade City. And without the riders, the drivers won't give it very long. That said, chicken-and-egg scenarios exist in every industry, and get hurdled all the time, so I'll be interested to watch how it goes for this one.
Ironically, the driving force behind Uber's popularity is its centralization and uniformity. Uber replaces the hodge-podge of thousands of different taxi operators with a single company that offers a single app with a single billing system everywhere in the country, while holding drivers to strict vehicle and service standards.
I don't know if that's the reason for uber's popularity. I think it, along with other ridesharing sites, are just another option in addition to taxi, car rentals and public transportation.
I wouldn't discount OP's comment at all. It's the main reason I use Uber. I couldn't care less about it's service vs. taxi's, or ridesharing, or most other things. The things I like about it are:
1) I have a single app that I can request a car in mere seconds in just about every major city
2) Payments are handled automatically
That's it. And #2 is an added bonus. #1 is the killer feature for me. I don't have to stand around trying to hail a cab, nor do I have look up a cab company's number to call a car and hope they have one available within a reasonable timeframe.
This is a little like "conjecturing" about the reason people liked iPods more than CD Walkmen. Even in places with very good cab service (NYC and Chicago), cabs are a fucking pain to work with, and Uber is incredibly simple to work with.
Among other things, taxis in the US are generally regulated at the municipal level, which is fine enough if you're in NYC, but somewhere like the Bay Area where there are dozens of small cities with crazy borders, you have to remember that Mountain View taxis are different from Sunnyvale taxis, which are different from San Mateo taxis or San Francisco taxis, and only San Francisco taxis are allowed to pick you up at the airport, but any town's taxis can take you there, so when you're going from the airport to somewhere that's not SF, you pay different rates and use a different company than when you're going to the airport. Uber abstracts all that away behind a nice API, which is the same not just for every Bay Area city, but for every city in the US, and many cities around the world too.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadUber's GPS mapping soloution doesn't work as magically as it needs to. Things change pretty quickly there. I don't think this could succeed without traditional support infrastructure.
Also, block chain updates over mobile? What is the data plan of those drivers going to look like?
Light nodes or just plain http. You don't need to download the entire blockchain.
Presumably, drivers could also use third-party mapping software / services, dispatchers, whatever aspects of the biz are not handled by the decentralized protocol.
Let's ignore that taxi drivers could avoid using any cryptocurrency. It's possible to have the ride hailing and rating systems done without bitcoin.
If we assume that bitcoin or a clone is the right network to use for the dispatch and ratings systems, then someone the taxi driver trusts has to run wallet software to verify that transactions are valid. It might be a good idea for them to have their own node for certain functions as well.
Wallet and node software could be run very cheaply in the taxi driver's home, or even in a project shared between drivers. So the objection about mobile bandwidth is easily overcome.
At that point their costs will be so low they'll be able to undercut anyone still using human drivers.
I guess not so recent, considering this article is from 2006: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/11fast.html?pag...
The combination of app-based ordering and drive-through delivery is one I strongly believe to be underutilized.
Examples of automation at McDonalds:
Self serve order kiosks http://www.businessinsider.com/what-self-serve-kiosks-at-mcd...
Automated beverage dispensers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k26g3YqAsfA
Digital menu boards that update based on conditions http://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9716058/mcdonalds-weather-me...
And then of course all the tech in their kitchen that take out all the guesswork (timed friers and the like).
Maybe (surely) there will be a squeeze on fees, but automation should move the income from active to semi passive for car owners.
I'm much more invested in how long it takes these things to be done than an hourly wage earner.
Self-checkout can be extremely convenient if it's done with a handheld scanner as you shop, as my local supermarket does. I can walk into the store with my backpack, fill it with groceries, see how much I'm spending (and whether discounts have processed properly) and then pay in a few seconds at the exit. The only minor hassle is if I'm buying alcohol I have to wait for someone to verify my age. And if I spend less than £20, I can even use contactless payment. Unfortunately the current system still requires a few steps to pay, but theoretically I could just beep my card and walk out.
>or pumping your own gas at a gas station.
Because they haven't really automated anything but the payment. If you could drive up and have a robot arm fill your car, it would be very convenient.
Loan payoff is usually gradual, so I'd imagine most of them from day 1 are underwater as far as what they owe and what the car would sell for on an open market.
Market similarly discounts used taxicabs, used police vehicles and anything that's re-sold by car rental places - such vehicles have higher mileage and are more likely to have been abused.
It depends on (1) how long from now you estimate cab driving may be obsolete, (2) how long the useful life of your car for cab purposes is, and (3) how driverless technology will change what the resale value of the car at its end of for-hire life otherwise would have been.
Uber requires fairly newish cars (not sure how reliable this link is, but according to http://www.idrivewithuber.com/uber-car-requirements/ it varies by type and area quite a bit from around 5 to 15 years) so if the car's useful life will only be 5 years (such as in NYC) and you estimate there's still around that much time or more left before drivers can be replaced, then it doesn't really matter. On the other hand, if your car's useful life is more like 15 years, you could be stuck with a useless asset. Maybe a driver/owner can also titrate the risk here by buying an already older car?
The other question is how widespread driverless technology would affect the resale value of these cars. Can a driver/owner just sell their car when they lose their job? On the one hand, for privately owned passenger cars, it's hard to imagine the resale value not being reduced, when car utilization rates can increase dramatically (right now a privately owned passenger car spends almost all its time parked, doing nothing useful for anyone).
On the other hand, for-hire vehicles (well, medallion cabs in NYC anyway, not sure how this compares elsewhere) already have utilization rates close to 100% (they're constantly being rented out to different drivers and are only off the streets when they're being maintained), so IF driverless technology is cheap to retrofit to these older cars, they should hold their value. ...And on the other other hand, right now once a for-hire vehicle can't be used as a cab, at least it can be resold as a private passenger vehicle. If private passenger vehicles are much cheaper because the demand is much lower due to much higher utilization, that stops being a good option. In that case, all you can really do is get as cheap a car as you can now, because it's going to have very little resale value after driverless technology hits.
Finally, a driver can rent a car. There are businesses specifically to do this. The risk is then shifted to the rental business (though presumably they charge appropriately for that). Yellow medallion cabs in NYC are almost all done this way, not sure what percentage of ubers are rented versus owned-by-the-driver.
Anyway, maybe the bigger risk is not the investment in the car, but the investment of time. If you are spending your whole workday driving for several years, you are getting very good at driving, and not getting good at any skill that will have market value after driving is automated. And even if there are any marketable skills that are related to driving (eg, let's pretend that driverless technology can't do CDL driving at first, or that a good cabbie can pick up airplane piloting quicker than average -- just silly examples), all the other displaced cab drivers will be chasing the same options. I think the more expensive asset at risk is the driver's skill and time than the car.
The rest all require a human driver that can take over in case the robot encounters something it can't handle.
It is equally or more likely, given the history of innovation, that a brand new company will win that space instead.
A more likely approach would be shared vehicles owned by groups of individuals/communities. A community neighborhood could own say 10 SDCs, which would have a scheduling platform and such that would effectively remove Uber from the equation altogether. I see individual car ownership dropping significantly and moving towards 'pay as you use' type service, where the car is just summoned to you. The owner, whether it's a company or group of individuals, would own the market there.
By that thought, the only way I see Uber lasting long, long-term is by offering a "fleet as a service" type deal, where any city/community/group could purchase it and split payments by usage.
Imagine you have those cars in China. Government just orders some company to spy on its users and then when certain people enters those cars, they will be steered towards some location where they can be arrested/tortured/killed, because they are enemies of the state. They can't get out of the car, because the locks are also controlled by algorithms. Who knows, maybe they can release some poisonous gas while the person is inside of a car.
Many possibilities are there. Governments are getting much more powerful, while the average homo sapiens is the same like when there was no government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy
In the Uber/Driver relationship, it seems at first glance that Uber has all the power. But in fact, the drivers have far more leverage. A single driver can drive for multiple apps, and in fact a significant percentage of the drivers I meet are simultaneously using Uber and Lyft.
Currently drivers using multiple platforms are pretty much only using Uber and/or Lyft. There is no third competitor. But if one emerges, especially with superior driver incentives, drivers will use it, even before any riders are on the platform. Even if demand on a new app is sparse, drivers have no reason not to download it and run it on their phone alongside Uber and Lyft. In the meantime while they wait for supply to grow, they can just continue using Uber and Lyft. But if this "third competitor" offers far greater incentives than Uber and Lyft, then once it's supply side achieves parity with its demand side, drivers will prefer it to Uber and Lyft.
So what does a "third competitor" look like to Uber or Lyft? It looks like a company (or something else!!) that gives 95% or more of revenue to its drivers, i.e. operates on minimal margins.
What are the requirements of a true p2p ridesharing platform?
--
- Bare minimum dependency on centralized third party resources
- Decentralized reputation and dispute resolution protocols
- Decentralized payment system, possibly involving an auction model
- Equilibrium of supply and demand
- Legal compliance without a dependency on a centralized market maker
--
No technological barrier exists to any of these requirements.
The most difficult aspect of a p2p ride sharing platform would be legal compliance. How do riders vet drivers, and how do drivers insure themselves? Perhaps the solution is a third party, uninvested in the ridesharing platform, that controls the reputation, dispute resolution, and insurance system. Asking the ridesharing platform to carry those responsibilities will only result in bloat and overhead costs that cut into the margins of drivers. Whereas if a third party manages legal compliance, drivers can price the cost of it into their own driving services, instead of the platform "passing down" the cost to drivers (and exaggerating its magnitude).
The second most difficult aspect would be bootstrapping supply and demand. The supply side is relatively easy, as long as the driver onboarding cost is low. The demand side is more difficult, because people trust Uber and Lyft. Building that trust in a decentralized system would not be easy, especially without legal compliance.
I challenge someone to create the Napster of ridesharing. No central servers allowed, mobile clients only, no financial overhead per transaction. The next step would be to create the trusted third party responsible for legal compliance.
A p2p platform that achieves supply/demand parity and solves the legal compliance problem will destroy Uber and Lyft, because the centralized costs of a p2p platform are zero. The drivers price their own services and have incentive to find the most economically efficient legal compliance. Therefore prices are lower than Uber and Lyft, so ultimately people will prefer p2p over centralized.
sidenote: I'm from the Portsmouth area. If anyone at arcade city is reading this, reach out! :)
Catch-call centralized solutions move faster than decentralized standards. Furthermore, decentralized standards don't make money. Ray Tomlinson (inventor of SMTP, the email protocol) isn't filthy rich, and yet everyone uses it.
So without the money incentive, and with the slow standards process (RFC is the closest to a "standardization" process for the internet)
Besides, everyone just uses Gmail anyway, centralizing into a single, catch-all platform for convenience. Decentralization may be good for people in general, but it seems like a terrible business move.
Its core business value would be the facilitation of legal compliance. The p2p ridesharing app would simply be another reason for drivers to use the compliance platform.
Its just like jet.com. You'll burn money trying to make volume, and then you run out of it.
https://www.ethereum.org/
How in the world are these connected. He's presenting it like its this obvious thing that needs to be connected when it's not clear at all why any blockchain needs to be involved.
The end benefit to the consumer being monopoly prevention isn't likely to outweigh the service guarantees of a centralized service.
What if the broad spectrum of Craigslist service providers included car drivers who could (somehow - hand wave) offer rides on Craigslist?
How much confidence would you have in them?
What condition would you expect their cars to be in?
What kind of driving record could be expected from the drivers?
How would you choose a driver from that spectrum?
Would you expect to pay less or the same as for an Uber ride?
Under what circumstances would you just avoid using a Craigslist driver altogether?
Admittedly, the article is light on technical details, but if you understand how blockchain technology works, you could easily deduce that a likely use case for this would be a service for connecting drivers to passengers without a middleman and without the regulatory burden that often prevents these services from proliferating in certain markets. A more fleshed out general case of a decentralized marketplace is OpenBazaar, which creates a marketplace with no middleman that can't be taken down.
There is no reason a blockchain based app couldn't be implemented. Whether this guy is actually on the right path or not is hard to say based on the article.
I don't think anyone is doubting this bit. It's the overwhelming current trend of forcing everything onto the blockchain, whether it improves the application or not. The interesting questions (frequently not answered) revolve around why one should do this.
There are good arguments for centralization, too. Not saying the blockchain argument win out. Just saying, the benefits are the same as for every other blockchain application, and well understood.
Surely a blockchain would only change that to anybody being able to track your travels, though?
1) open source hailing app or dispatcher 2) rating system with identities
For the hailing or dispatcher, we don't need bitcoin but it may be useful if there is abuse to impose some cost on hails (e.g., uber employees generating fake hails, haha).
For the rating and identity, we can use a GPG web of trust.
1) I have a single app that I can request a car in mere seconds in just about every major city
2) Payments are handled automatically
That's it. And #2 is an added bonus. #1 is the killer feature for me. I don't have to stand around trying to hail a cab, nor do I have look up a cab company's number to call a car and hope they have one available within a reasonable timeframe.
I myself think it's important to look around at different options when looking for transportation and lodging.
I'm sure people's reasons are more complex and vary from time to time.
Looks like this is where the development is headed. I really didn't want to have to learn Go; is there a rust implementation yet?