Can the blockchain make Uber, Spotify and Airbnb obsolete?
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like the author does not realize that higher abstractions don't always make a solution better.
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.
So, the answer to the headline is a resounding No
The entire premise is pretty backwards as the infrastructure for all of these services goes quite a bit beyond the data and payment channels.
> 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.
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