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.pubOPM
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    1 year ago

    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.