Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis if the mayor signs a minimum wage bill for drivers - Infosec.Pub
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Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis if the mayor signs a minimum wage bill for drivers::Lyft and Uber threatened to stop doing business in Minneapolis after the city council adopted a new rule Thursday that would set a minimum wage for rideshare drivers.

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).

  • demesisx@infosec.pubOPMEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    no problem! I will edit this comment more later but I have a big smile on my face because you come from the same spirit of intellectual honesty and idealistic curiosity that I do.

    In the vast possibilities of technological evolution, should an innovation emerge that propels us closer to a truly egalitarian civilization, whether it be cryptocurrency or of some other nature, it is the outcome, not the medium, that truly resonates with me.

    • meyotch@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Ha! Looking forward to it. It would be interesting to cross post or repost this in different communities to get different audiences.

      I could see Minneapolis saying ‘byeeee’ to Uber and making a public service. That isn’t much different from governments giving out taxi medallions, save that they hopefully wouldn’t limit the supply to create artificial scarcity.

      Anyhow, good times!