
China's 'sharing economy' booms, but can it last? - stephenboyd
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-sharingeconomy-analysis-idUSKBN18P0T2
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jzwinck
I don't know about renting basketballs but I do believe in bicycle sharing
schemes. The article mentions the fairly recent entries in Singapore of
"stationless" rental bikes, and I have seen first hand how this is going.

Sharing is appealing. And thanks to VC money, it's cheap. But as soon as it
goes from a small local thing with passionate users to a big business with a
big cross section of the overall population, dynamics change.

In Singapore the sharing companies are the present beneficiaries of a
government "wait and see" period. The more popular they become, the more
incidents occur that will do them no favours. Bikes dumped in rivers. Bikes
parked in car traffic lanes on busy roads. Bikes parked in residential racks.
Bikes hidden from view to prevent sharing.

This is ugly. This is what it looks like when your shared goods are widely
adopted with no expensive enforcement. This is happening in Singapore, one of
the most rule-abiding, nice cities in the world.

You want a million customers? The woodwork is buzzing.

~~~
masteryupa_
Purely conjecture here as I'm not sure on the specifics of the rental system
but surely there is some measure of accountability in operation?

I was under the impression that by scanning a qr code it registered the rental
to your account, hence discouraging bad actor behaviour with the potential
punishments for discarding or hoarding a bicycle that those actions would
incur in fines etc.

If not, how difficult could this type of measure be to implement?

~~~
jmknoll
Regarding the bikes being kept for personal use, its a quirk of the way one of
the bike-sharing systems worked. Ofo, one of the biggest players, didn't have
any sort of GPS system on the bikes. Rather, each bike has a license plate
with a numerical code, which, when put into an app, gives you a number for a
padlock which will unlock the bike. Now, the number in the padlock doesn't
change, so people quickly figured out that they could write down the code for
the padlock, rip the license plate off the bike (or scratch off the number),
and then no one else can use their bike.

I believe this company has added GPS tracking to the bikes now, but this was a
pad enough product design flaw that it should have rendered this company
incapable of making money. I haven't seen any numbers from them, but I would
be extremely surprised to see them bringing in any significant revenue,
nonetheless profits.

I haven't downloaded their app, but I've used their bikes a number of times,
as they're currently littering the sidewalks of Shanghai, many with their
locking mechanisms ripped off or permanently opened.

Nonetheless, this company was valued north of $1 Billion as of their last
fundraising round.

Feels pretty bubble-ish to me.

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theprop
This is on a renting economy.

Sharing economy I feel usually refers to a person-to-person marketplace where
asset ownership is decentralized (i.e. airbnb you rent out your room or uber
you rent you a ride in your car).

That said, I agree with most comments that bike renting sounds quite useful,
but things like umbrella renting sound a bit more dicey.

~~~
arthurcolle
Sine you mention it, I feel obliged to point out that the only project that
seems to be working on a real alternative to the sharing economy giants right
now is Swarm City, a distributed application built on Ethereum
([https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1794644.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1794644.0)
for information post). Despite the current ICO craze, most of the funded
projects don't seem to be working on problems that affect everyday people with
the exception of a few select projects.

Disclaimer: I'm a backer of the Swarm City project, but outside of that I
truly believe that dApps that are able to solve the problem of sharing economy
businesses built on privately controlled infra maintained by corporations
completely financed with massive amounts of VC funding do not have correct
incentive alignment with the providers of services or the users of the
services, which makes exploration of alternatives a moral and social
obligation.

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dis-sys
For bicycle sharing schemes, yes, for many other projects/companies, NO.

There are lots meaningless 'sharing economy' projects out there are for the
solo purpose of getting cheap VC money. The whole 'sharing economy' term is
just an convenient slogan used to sell their meaningless & never profitable
project. The most stupid one I've ever seen is the the shared power bank
rubbish. You can buy a brand name highly reliable power bank from jd.com for
$7, if that is too expensive, jd.com has $3 power bank available as well. Yet,
people still started numerous shared power bank companies asking for $15
deposit to rent their dirty & ugly power bank for a fee.

That being said, it does offer some good entertainments for the public - Wang
Sicong, the only child of the richest Chinese promised to eat poo should such
power bank sharing schemes can end up being successful.

~~~
inimino
Does JD deliver the power bank, charged and ready to use, to the cafe within
two minutes of your order? If not, your comparison is totally irrelevant and
misses the point of the service.

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konstmonst
Here is an interesting video from a Westerner living in China about bike
sharing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi9G1jLUeUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi9G1jLUeUk)

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ronkwan
nothing lasts in china, even communism

~~~
Banthum
To be fair, communism doesn't last anywhere.

~~~
virmundi
To be fair, it's never been tried. At the time the only country that could do
it was Germany. Now, most of the Western world would probably work. China
couldn't meet the requirements so they hacked the ideas to fit an agrarian
system and nearly killed them selves in the process. Perhaps they should try
now.

~~~
bpodgursky
Russia by the 1980s was a industrialized nation, and no, it continued to not
work.

~~~
virmundi
They already had the old hacked institutions from the bolshevik. Russia never
tried reform. China has a history of changing policy.

I'm not saying this will work. In fact I don't think it will. I'm just saying
if anyone want to try it and have the will to do it, it could be China.

