I'm much more interested in a free-form decentralized general delivery platform for food. The customer places the order directly with the merchant, and the delivery person just delivers and is paid directly for delivery.
Why? Because I'm very annoyed at postmates/uber eats, doordash, and grubhub. At my fiancee's place, there is a restaurant we love. Neither we, nor the restaurant moved, and yet postmates suddenly claims that it is now "too far to deliver". The restaurant is on doordash, but they gatekeep the menu, and basically none of the restaurant's menu is available except for soda and extra napkins. The place isn't even on grubhub. There are many more places like that. I've placed orders for pickup and round-trip uber'ed to get them, but that's a huge waste of time.
What I want is a service where if I place an order myself for pickup, I can book a courier to get the food for me. Please tell me somebody is working on this.
Everyone wants this but no one really wants this. The reason these restrictions exist is because of food quality issues, conditions at the pickup, wait times, courier feedback etc. Every food delivery co at some point did deliveries from certain places and went on to restrict them because for one reason or another the experience was not great for the customer / fleet or the merchant. At least that's how we did things at Postmates
I'm not a fan of companies telling me what I want. I'm aware things take time, and the food we order from this place travels well and reheats well. Post a click-thru warning and let me decide for myself.
The restaurant probably doesn't want the bad press associated with other customers getting cold/melted/soggy/etc food. Also, the restaurant may want to limit the amount of takeaway, as the venue may be small to accommodate too many carriers coming and going. Also, the courier may not like the route, maybe it takes too long (due to distance, but also traffic and other road conditions) and it's not worthwhile for them. The point is that you are just one piece of the equation and those apps are not necessarily telling you what you want, but telling you what they want.
Shouldn't those concerns be addressed by the restaurant itself, rather through various delivery platforms? After all, there's no real difference between you going to pick up the food yourself and you hiring a contractor to do it.
There is a difference. People are far less likely to go themselves, so that may be manageable by the restaurant. The app brings a lot more orders in. The restaurant possibly solved the problem by telling the delivery platform. If they suddenly had a bunch of couriers showing up at their door at peak times their solution would likely be similar, by telling the customer that they live too far away so they won’t let them order takeaway or something else along those lines. But the restaurants probably prefer to deal with a single party that can handle that bit of customer satisfaction for them.
Why is the delivery service concerned about the food quality at all? Post office is not concerned about quality of products it ships and I don't see anyone expecting it to be.
The Postal service is a utility competing on efficiency and price. That's not what "tech unicorns" get billion dollar valuations to compete on. Tech is about building a "platform" to siphon off money for all eternity while doing little of the ongoing labor of delivering or producing the value. To build that platform you need a moat, because otherwise somebody will come in a compete on price, so you build brand loyalty by gate-keeping the quality of stuff on your platform. That way any competing platform will initially be primarily populated by all the stores too "bad" to be marketed with the incumbent.
It's quite simply not financially lucrative enough to run a utility for venture capitalists. In a more sane, less inflated economic climate, this might change.
Because they aren't just "delivery services" and don't want to be, as a delivery service (or any other sustainable, boring "utility business") has poor potential for monopolising a market and the "growth & engagement" VC tech-bros want.
This would be great, but you still need the oversight and accountability that the apps provide. That needs to be offloaded to either you (you pay and trust your courier) or the restaurant (they charge you for their trusted couriers).
It makes more sense to me for the restaurant to validate their own team of couriers, so what you really need is a company that builds a widget which allows restaurants to cheaply host a grubhub/doordash equivalent on their own. They just need some super low-code no friction solution because restaurants can be pretty tech averse. You would need to really figure out what the killer features of grubhub/doordash are and how to put those in the hands of the restaurant, I imagine the 20+% cut that grubhub takes would make it an easy sell.
A courier’s union could provide oversight and loss compensation. It’s the most decentralized way to do it imo.
EDIT: and health insurance and worker protection!
Isn't a union just another form of centralization? Ostensibly the whole appeal of decentralization is that larger organizations incentivizes stray from workers and customers, and a large union is a large organization. The idea of a restaurant being the central unit appeals to me because it is never going to be > 30 individuals so will always be exposed to workers interests.
Centralization describes a system where one organization controls the whole network. This is like Uber or Twitter. Decentralization describes a system where multiple organizations work together and there is no central point of control. This would be couriers unions or mastodon. In mastodon a single server can host thousands of users but no server controls the network. Then there is peer-to-peer and this would be like Matrix chat or a system where customers pay couriers as individuals. Here is a diagram:
https://teblocha.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/sas.png
A system where restaurants take responsibility for deliveries is in principle decentralized as well, but I would argue that being a restaurant and managing deliveries are generally different tasks. Without other controls that system would likely devolve to one central firm contracting our delivery workers to restaurants, which is essentially exactly what we have now.
The issue with worker protection is not really about the size of the organization, but about who has control and decision making power. I suppose I should have said a cooperative of delivery drivers instead of a union, because in the USA the Taft-Hartley act severely compromised how unions behave and centralized their power in union leadership. So that was my mistake in phrasing.
But I believe a cooperatively run delivery service would better look out for the rights of delivery drivers specifically, compared to restaurants who are more focused on managing food service and would be likely to subcontract delivery service to a centralized firm.
Or look we have it both ways and restaurants subcontract to a cooperative of delivery drivers. My point is delivery drivers should organize and collectively manage their jobs. Actually I think every firm in our economy should be a cooperative.
We seem to have, in our fervor over decentralization, forgotten that centralization of systems and services leads to lower cost and higher efficiency. That's why we do it now, and that's why it's been an emergent property of human systems for millennia.
A decentralized uber - just like a gig economy uber - cannot benefit from pooling leases, cannot benefit from pooling insurance and as a result has a higher cost basis than a taxi service. People will take the cheapest option when a service is a commodity.
This is just as true of food delivery.
Decentralization has no inherent value to a customer beyond the ideological. Stop decentralizing things for its own sake and start focusing on the economics.
It isn't inherently more efficient, humans are just bad at organizing past a certain scale so companies needed middle managers/accountants/executives. A single individual handling insurance/billing/accounting/legal would be crazy in the past but it is feasible today. In decentralized the centralization still exists it is just offloaded to software.
Is there, today, a single decentralized system that is measurably more efficient than a centralized solution? Please do not include regulatory arbitrage where rules are simply not followed due to lack of will or ability to enforce.
Is it true that the absolute costs associated with centralization is lower than decentralization? Maybe there's some efficiencies in bulk orders, but there's so much overhead with BigCorp I would expect that the actual operating costs would be lower.
No evaluation of a decentralized idea is complete without an economic assessment because we know that the economics are a serious potential issue. If you do that and it makes sense, go with god, but the burden of proof is on the proposer that the business makes even the slightest bit of sense.
Some ride hailing apps have courier option available. Perhaps not in the US though? You could order a taxi and ask driver to retrieve your order for you for a tip?
What are some reasons a restaurant owner would not want their restaurant on GrubHub (let alone their listing as fleshed out/optimized/detailed as possible)?
They're either too busy or they're deliberately ignoring it/avoiding it for ______ reasons (they don't want the headache that comes with "grubhub" style customers/orders/confusion?)
Some kind of food really doesn't travel well or needs to be eaten soon after being prepared, and customers frustratingly mentally take it out on the restaurant instead of the delivery platform. The results in a ton of complaints and even lost future customers. These complaints are extra brutal because they might be left on Yelp instead of merely on GrubHub. There are also apparently a ton of cancellations via GrubHub, so the restaurant can end up eating the preparation cost of a bunch of orders. Things can also be super confusing for restaurants that don't have an essentially-permanently fixed menu, because GrubHub will result in a ton of obsolete menu items being ordered by people who then have to talk to the restaurant in frustration. This last bit can be fixed if you pay GrubHub to become a "partner", but now that's a complex business model decision that might simply not make sense for every restaurant.
In Texas, Favor (owned by HEB, the grocery chain) allows for this. They interface directly with some restaurants like UberEats or Grubhub, but you can order anything from anywhere and they’ll go and place the order as a regular to-go request.
Come on. If you have the financial resources to get on HN and pay for restaurant food and delivery service then you can afford some kind of used car and/or bike. The vast majority of people with mobility issues are still capable of driving and/or cycling with some appropriate vehicle modifications. My neighbor uses a motorized wheelchair and drives a modified minivan with a lift. I've seen elderly people with balance issues riding adult tricycles around town.
If you're drunk then maybe you should have planned ahead. Or just heat up a frozen pizza.
The backend stuff described here is relatively trivial. You could just do everything on a blockchain, at the expense of poor scalability if it actually took off and the eternal reproach of HN.
The thing that is very hard to replicate is that Uber provides a form of insurance and moderation, where human operators can choose to refund for cancelled rides in situations where it is tricky to determine who is at fault.
They are also able to do it optimistically, refunding people and then adjusting policies if it turns out the policies are being abused. This stuff is very hard to encode into a decentralized protocol.
> They are also able to do it optimistically, refunding people and then adjusting policies if it turns out the policies are being abused. This stuff is very hard to encode into a decentralized protocol.
Whats the nexus between centralization and ability to refund? Regardless of centralization i can cancel my credit card to stop you from clawing back an optimistic refund, regardless of centralization the protocol could force a waiting period before withdrawing optimistically refunded monies, etc.
There's any number of ways to solve the problem of refunds. Escrow contracts come to mind. The only question is what kind of rules/mediation we'd want to implement.
You're exactly right --and there are some ways to solve the problem while remaining decentralized.
The ideas you bring up are, essentially: credit, insurance, risk, reputation.
Tracking reputation on-chain is workable, and already exists. For instance, some airdrops have been done based on on-chain activity and reputation. Decentralized founders wanted to reward those with "good on-chain behavior."
The way I imagine this would work for a decentralized Uber:
- Pay for fares on-chain (ideally, a 2nd or 3rd layer, e.g. a ZK rollup)
- Drivers rate users on-chain, using the payment address
- Possibly use other on-chain information to form a "credit/reputation profile"
It's possible this entire idea of reputation/credit could be packaged into a dedicated protocol that could be referenced by any number of other on-chain systems (such as this decentralized uber). There are some projects along these lines in existence, I believe, but none have gotten traction yet, and are mostly focused around lending.
To protect privacy, we'd need to take extra care to shield user info (using e.g. ZK proofs), or just make everything completely transparent. It's also possible to use privacy for the payments/assets system, and make the reputation system transparent.
I do not think we'd want to be storing ride data, etc. on-chain. I'd look into something like OrbitDB, or some other decentralized system that's meant to be a database.
How would a blockchain ride-hailing system work for women - would it expect people to jump into any car with a driver who claims to own blockchain address X (with ratings from other addresses)?
The world looks quite different when a significant proportion of the population are significantly stronger than you - strong enough that you couldn't physically stop them doing horrible things to you.
Uber with random drivers is sketchy, but you know there's been at least minimal background checks, and knowing that Uber are tracking the ride gives a bit more safety.
Maybe this is ok. The reputation of the account is still at stake and the friend may have trusted you with their private keys so that you can give taxi rides and increase the overall account reputation.
If the private keys were stolen then a malicious person could impersonate your friend and act badly. Similarly, in the current system, a person can pretend to be a taxi driver and act badly.
This has been proposed and the protocol developed and a sample app deployed in Bangalore [1].
The app leverages the ONDC protocol and Beckn [2]. There are technical talks on it by the founder of Beckn who was also the architect of Aadhar which is India's Biometric identity system. Beckn was also cofounded by the founder of UPI, which is India's digital payment system and currently the largest in the world. Great Video explainer on Beckn [3].
Not decentralized in the same way but The Drivers Cooperative is an Uber style app in NYC except it's organized as a cooperative where the divers themselves have all the power.
I'm amused that people here are all "blockchain," which technically could work but is completely unnecessary.
The only time you need blockchain ever, is for censorship/government resistance; and e.g. "decentralised Uber" could literally be done municipally. Strikes me as a good government use case.
Most people who are into blockchain stuff would not use the word "decentralised" to describe a system where a municipal government has unilateral control.
The thing that they solve well is incentivizing people to operate a network, and doing so with security properties that are different from centralized networks. In the case of "decentralised Uber", that would look like an Uber network that continued working even if some subset of participants became evil or disappeared. With sometime like Bitcoin for example, you could shift the security property from
"network behaves correctly as long as the local government is honest and online"
to
"network behaves correctly as long as >50% of hash power is honest and >X% of hashpower is online"
It's not really about censorship and only a tiny bit about government resistance. It's more about not trusting anyone. My personal take is that some trust is good for an uber-like product, so current-gen blockchain solution would be worse than actual Uber.
Exactly; the "trust" problem is the only one that "blockchain" solves, and it does so at the price of extreme inefficiency.
As for your first statement; exactly, and to me this sort of shows the limited thinking of many "into blockchain" people. Bitcoin and money is a pretty good use-case, and I can think of maybe a few others.
But, local government control of some local things works extremely well in a lot of cases, and I can see no reason why it couldn't for an uber/doordash replacement.
The answer depends a lot on what you decide "Uber" means (the article talks about "User Needs", which is a good lens to make this decision through).
For riders, not having to locate and setup the service is going to matter at least some of the time, and is not well addressed by local systems.
I don't think blockchain is likely to be the answer either. It adds enough complexity that things anyway end up "centralized" in the primary implementation of the system, so you might as well directly implement something that isn't all turned inside out to enable blockchain storage.
Not well addressed today, sure. But that strikes me purely as a result of Uber/Lyfts first mover advantage plus scale; today they're enormously deep-pocketed and could (and probably have) easily squelch any sort of "local Uber" chatter, despite it being (to me at least) a no brainer.
This is a great topic that once matured could disrupt many other services such as AirBnb, Doordash, and even Amazon. Some level of centralization would likely be needed depending on the use case, but the goal could be to decentralize as much as feasible to distribute benefit more to nodes/providers.
In the ride share situation, the need for identification and reputation scoring is probably overrated. We flagged taxis and paid cash for a hundred years with little problems. I have hitchhiked all over the world for years and never had any real problem. Some safety mechanism should be in place for more vulnerable people. The app would know the license plate and make of car, and a button on the app clicked a few times could dispatch police using GPS. This would make it safer than walking down a street. The driver would have similar emergency button that sent all the relevant information via 911 channel.
It may not yet be time to launch this, but the existing ride share duopoly will be facing more problems ahead in financing and regulation that will eventually make this alternative very appealing.
> We flagged taxis and paid cash for a hundred years with little problems
In my home town, rogue taxis are a big problem. Not with robbery usually; but with rigged meters, not using a meter, deliberate detours, picking up extra customers along the way, harassment against women, cheating pocket money out of child, etc.
Those were surprisingly rampant especially at airports and train stations because tourists typically don’t know what price/time to expect. The amount of deception is frankly speaking, staggering.
Centralized apps, with a relatively transparent quote beforehand, a map and route in the customer’s hand, largely solved this problem.
It also seemed to have improved the average tidiness, given that it’s part of the rating. It used to be that the drivers would happily smoke in your face even if there are children or pregnant parent.
This is just one city of course. I don’t presume that every city was infested with horrible taxi drivers like where I come from. But to me, “with little problem” is not how I’d characterize the taxi business of the past.
I have experienced a few rogue taxi drivers in some countries too, and they can take advantage of more vulnerable people. Most countries have laws and rules for being a registered taxi driver. The drivers are obviously not anonymous as they have license plates. They can be reported to authorities and taxi companies more easily with an app. As a rider, I do not see why it is so important to identify myself and tell all these platforms where I am going which is why I still prefer taxis.
I mean, as a rider, I, too, do not see why it is so important to identify myself to the platforms. That's not the part that I like about the apps.
The taxi companies in my hometown don't give a flying toss about complaints.
The customer essentially has no power of making an informed choice when it comes to picking a driver. A driver might have been complained about 800 times in the last year, but you can't know that, and therefore it can't be used against the driver.
A frequently complained driver brings the same amount of money to the company as a well-behaved one, so as long as they don't cause any legal trouble, the companies don't care and don't act.
Centralized app itself doesn't solve the problem. In my city after a short happy period we're back to crappy taxis like you describe. Mostly because the biggest app (Bolt) doesn't care. And the city doesn't care as well. Possibly because of personal connections with the local branch of said company.
I think for a large part of the population getting in a car with a stranger is fundamentally not a trustless activity, and no combination of tokens, hashes, customer reviews or market forces is going to make it so. Even more if the driver is anonymous apart from an address in a blockchain.
> In the ride share situation, the need for identification and reputation scoring is probably overrated.
I don't think that at all. Reputation systems strongly discourage bad actors from joining the system. Look at email spam for the importance of reputation in distributed systems, and then consider that people are risking auto accidents, being the victim of a violent crime, or being scammed.
I agree that the service provider/driver needs to be licensed, registered, insured, and accountable. The customer rating system seems optional and not MVP.
But how? Amazon's strength in the retail is their own automated warehouses, their own fleet of delivery vehicles, and various agreements with shippers and larger-scale producers of goods. It all benefits from scale, and not from decentralization into a network of independent nodes.
Amazon is the most complex one, but people are already working on different aspects of it. I think it would need to be broken down to a decentralized protocol for the marketplace and another for fulfillment and logistics at a minimum.
Surely recruitment costs and CAC are a huge part of this business. You can't just make a two-sided market with all these things being free?
What's important is that "local" seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Food delivery companies charge fees like they are introducing me to restaurants I have known about for years. But since there is not a "local internet" it's all the same.
We had decentralized Uber. It's called the taxi system. And it was beyond awful. Limited drivers due to quota (aka medallion) systems, times you couldn't get a cab (eg shift changes), cabs that would refuse your ride (to be fair, this happens with Uber too), payment friction (including skimmers), areas that weren't serviced, awful cars, awful service and no ability to order a taxi.
It's only tech purists who want decentralized services. Nobody else does. It doesn't solve any problem actual people have. It's why everything is cetralized. That's not an accident. It's not a market failure.
Drivers don't subscribe/join, companies do. You don't take a cut of every ride, you take fees monthly/quarterly/yearly. For the driver, everything looks mostly the same, and they can still operate on a hail basis. But they can also claim dispatched rides.
Now, as the app, you don't have to give five shits about taxi regulations. About driver safety, passenger safety, driver pay, etc. That's all handled at the local level, where it should be.
You exist to provide a common payment interface and location-based routing of requests to nearby companies. And that's essentially it.
"Decentralized Uber" is asking the wrong question.
Taxi services will always be a regulated profession. There will always be certificates and exams and unions.
What "decentralized Uber" would actually look like would be a standardized protocol for taxi agencies so that with the same app you can call a taxi in NY or LA. They would have to set up a server and when you go to another city instead of calling a phone number you simply navigate to the website or put a unique code in your app and you can immediately call a taxi through them.
I think I agree with the article in that the actual problem is to make drivers "accountable" with something that works like a rating.
To achieve that without centralisation requires some variant of crypto signatures. To make them expensive to "fake", they need to cost something. One suggestion would then be to make the payment receipt the rating signature. In this scenario, drivers would publish their ratings which consist of the signatures/receipts of previous fares.
Wouldn’t that be relatively cheap and easy for a driver to game? They would just need to
Hail a ride from themselves and then sign the receipt. The money goes to them. So it’s not very costly.
Not exactly though, since it's presumably harder to make sure you got assigned the ride that you requested in Uber than in a system with more openness/choice.
I am a big Bitcoin guy. But I cringe everytime someone yell 'blockchain' as if that somehow equals to decentralization automatically
BitTorrent is almost as decentralized as it gets. It has no blockchain.
I don't have all the answers. But my guess is the crux in decentralizing ride sharing is reputation portability. Probably need a DID and a way to accumulate attestations, ideally directly from riders, in a fashion that the driver owns it, cannot be censored but also cannot be faked. Once that part is in place the rest is just commodity app type of deal.
black cabs in the UK(well only London) are all independent. The only thing that is common is that they have a license to operate and have passed the "knowledge"
Minicabs in the UK are different, you need to be Disclosure and Barring Service "passed" ie not a convicted sex pest. Every town used to have a number of minicab firms. You needed to know the number of a few of them. There are a number of aggregators that now act as a broker to them (even though uber exists here.)
Independent in the sense that they have to buy their taxi from one manufacturer, get approval from one board, take an exam provided by one examiner, charge the same price, and - seemingly - all have the same funny anecdote about driving a drunk celebrity.
Don't get me wrong - being able to hail a cab in central London is vastly quicker than working out which dodgy minicab app is working today. But they're hardly decentralised. They are fairly autonomous though.
Didn't we have that already when there was a bunch of independent taxi/car companies in each town? You could call one of them up on the telephone (in a decentralized manner). They could drive to your location (via a decentralized route), and take you to what ever decentralized location you like.
Heck, if you even get banned by one for puking in the car, you can always just call a different company the next ride.
So there, I just invented it. I'm going to call it "DUber".
And it sucked. The drivers could never find where I was, or wanted to go. It took a lot longer for them to arrive when they could find me. I had to carry cash, because half of them claimed their credit card readers were broken.
There are problems with Uber and Lyft, but they were both such a huge improvement over traditional cabs that it's not surprising that they quickly became popular.
Their app was the only differentiator. My local Scottish towns taxi company has an app that is feature complete for everything needed (granular location on me and driver, call through to driver or visa-versa, auto payment, specify private or business (auto generate receipt if business) etc etc.
That doesn't and has never required a multi $billion wedge driven into gap in the market.
The whole idea that it needed a single monolith to spark change was a nonsense.
It shouldn't be hard. Reputation could be achieved with some form crypto signatures and identity based maybe on phone numbers, with traceable identities. Blockchain not needed or helpful. (A rating signature must probably include a payment receipt from a third party - signed by both driver and passenger as part of the transaction.)
Local relays and DHT-servers would be run on a charity-basis like tor. Also trivial.
Searching for cabs would be similar to a file search on gnutella, though I don't know the details of how that works.
The tricky bit is to make it payment-service agnostic.
Blockchain identities makes the most sense since the identity can be non-custodial and also tied to finances/payments intrinsically (can use stablecoins or native crypto for payments) and there's already some proliferation of web3 wallet providers.
For scale, you can use a layer 2 chain to batch transactions off-chain. And then you can go further and implement zero knowledge proofs to keep identities private but attestations public.
The phone numbers could be the public identities included in the rating signatures, (ex: "555-12345, 5 stars, <$10 signed by paypal>" signed by me.)
Drivers are incentivised to stick to one phone number, and to publish these ratings (through p2p). The clients could sort them by recency, so the meaning of old signatures would eventually expire.
How much value does centralization / federation add?
99% of rides are local users, and of the remaining 1%, 99% of those are from a hotel, airport or local's place. In other words the concierge can call you a cab, the airport can vet the taxi stand or a trusted local can book you a ride.
IOW, the solution that might win is something like NYC's drivers cooperative. If it's the best for local users, that's enough to win and non-locals have an inferior experience.
Why? Because I'm very annoyed at postmates/uber eats, doordash, and grubhub. At my fiancee's place, there is a restaurant we love. Neither we, nor the restaurant moved, and yet postmates suddenly claims that it is now "too far to deliver". The restaurant is on doordash, but they gatekeep the menu, and basically none of the restaurant's menu is available except for soda and extra napkins. The place isn't even on grubhub. There are many more places like that. I've placed orders for pickup and round-trip uber'ed to get them, but that's a huge waste of time.
What I want is a service where if I place an order myself for pickup, I can book a courier to get the food for me. Please tell me somebody is working on this.