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Can the blockchain make Uber, Spotify and Airbnb obsolete? (medium.com/backchannel)
16 points by steven on Jan 6, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



From the article: "Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb, and the rest — is just a glorified listing service, enhanced with some combination of real-time connections, trust-building systems, and transaction-easing tools.

I don't understand this at all. The author seems to be arguing that the blockchain, which is "a cryptographically protected shared database " is actually the major part of Uber, Spotify, and AirBnb's business. That seems like a fantastical, ludicrous statement. The author is dismissing the entirety of the business logic, management tools, and user experience as being irrelevant. It's the other way round: these business could operate with pen and paper because the storage mechanism is irrelevant. But they couldn't operate without a all the operational and user experience in place.


I think you are right vis-a-vis the article...but maybe the author does have a point that "Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb, and the rest" could be disrupted through decentralization making the centralized services obsolete?

Example, I have an underutilized asset I want to leverage in the "sharing economy", say a house I want to rent. As long as the end user trusts the transaction is legit, which I think could be achieved through a decentralized system, I don't need the "tools" of these centralized services.


In your example how do you tell renters you have a house for them?

If the answer is "some service like Airbnb that uses the blockchain", I'd contend that the end user really doesn't care what it's built on.

The service is the marketplace, not the legitimacy of the transaction.

The problem that decentralized services will always have is that someone has to make them, and those companies will lose out on all the benefits of a centralized system (primarily control). A centralized competitor will exploit those benefits with no detriment because again, users don't care what's behind the front end they interact with. Any company looking to build something is going to have a hard time explaining to free market investors why it is in their best interest to relinquish control for whatever the blockchain gives them in return.


> end user trusts the transaction is legit

Maybe that's the hard part these companies solve for. When a deal turns sour you have someone to shout at. With a blockchain, you have no one. In effect, the companies you mentioned are the facilitators of trustful transactions.


Came here to say basically this, but want to add one thing: they also don't talk about reputation and management of that reputation. In order words, you wouldn't take an Uber ride with someone that has 1/5 star rating. How would the blockchain deliver this info to the user in a concise, readable way?

Seems like the author does not realize that higher abstractions don't always make a solution better.


> How would the blockchain deliver this info to the user in a concise, readable way?

Easy, the rating system is part of the blockchain. An app would consume the blockchain and determine what to display, just like bitcoin apps right now. In fact, it's easier for me to imagine a rating system using the blockchain rather than a ridesharing platform.


The blockchain doesn't drive cars or allow people to sleep in rooms. It doesn't store or provide music

So, the answer to the headline is a resounding No


The blockchain doesn't move currency, either. You are thinking of the blockchain as a living organism rather than what it is, a store of information.


So true


I'm very enthusiastic about Bitcoin but I feel like there is a massive number of people who would have an extremely hard time figuring it out. For that reason, I'm skeptical about mass adoption until things get easier for the less technical folks.


I don't know if you ever get the option to down-vote an article, but I really wish I could with this one.

The entire premise is pretty backwards as the infrastructure for all of these services goes quite a bit beyond the data and payment channels.


See also reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization, named-data-networking, and web assembly. I think ultimately a common cross-environment cross-language platform with semantic versioning and a peer-to-peer module registry will make it much more practical to adopt and evolve these types of systems.


This is an interesting, thought-provoking piece. Don't be discouraged by the linkbaity title. The author himself acknowledges the linkbaityness:

> Any reasonable answer to these questions has to be: Not yet. Not for a long time. But a person can dream, no?

But there's a cool idea lurking somewhere just beyond his grasp:

> Windley is excited about using blockchains today to build registries. We need directories to find things; here’s a way to “put a directory on” anything without requiring a private-company middleman. The companies won’t go away. But, as with email, he says, their services will be interoperable, and you’ll be able to switch providers.

A blockchain is a ledger (piece of paper that records transactions) with perfect memory of every single transaction that has ever occurred within a certain network. This makes double spending within the network impossible as you can trace every single "coin" in the network back to its origin, verifying that your trading partner does, in fact, have the coin he claims to. This removes the need for a trusted third party to oversee/verify transactions.

The author misunderstands the properties of the blockchain, instead seeing it as some kind of handwavey tool that can decentralize any kind of listing + licensing + verifying-as-a-service type businesses.

If you got every Uber and Lyft driver to sign up on a single block chain, thereby creating a "distributed" ledger, you would basically just have an excel spreadsheet full of names, numbers, and constantly updated ride metrics (which both companies have right now). But the reason Yelp/Uber/Spotify/AirBnB exist is because they actively verify and license products [restaurants/drivers/rentals] and resolve customer/provider disputes.

The blockchain stores and remembers - it cannot license or remediate. This requires human action, usually in the form of a centralized, for-profit organization.

The cool idea is that if you were an organization that only focused on building these distributed ledgers, vetting and aggregating quality products [restaurants/drivers/rentals], you could then force Uber and Lyft into a much tighter competition as their pool of inputs (drivers) would be coming from the same source, rather than two walled-off ledgers. This is where the idea of a union/collaborative comes in - strength in numbers. If the labor market was tighter and there were some sort of driver certification process besides getting a license, a driver's union would solve the problem of too much corporate power, not enough labor power in negotiations.

But at the end of the day, you need someone to code and maintain the distributed ledger and to spearhead and guide the union/collaborative. There is no such thing as pure decentralization.



[deleted]


If you read the article, you would find out that the blockchain could store information about the driver. All rides would be public, so your app can determine a rating for any particular driver.




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