Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, but I am precisely talking about this: using the blockchain for what it is good at today, instead of trying to put everything on a decentralized system (which is really hard or just impossible for now).
Uber / Lyft and others have a reputation system in place, opaque and developed specifically for their product. It’s an important part, but it is just a brick in the complexity of the services they are building.
I am talking about replacing this brick by an open, blockchain-based reputation service (that doesn’t exist AFAIK). That way, any app developer could benefit from the transparency and guaranteed properties from the blockchain. It could even be easier to use than to implement it as a private system.
The specific features that I find interesting to build an “open trust system” built on top of it, compared to a traditional database, are:
- Transparency: anyone can explore this database, and verify that the software is using it in a transparent way. It might sound not important for something like Uber, but if you build an open trust system that could be used by different services, it becomes very important for authors (Uber, Lyft, etc.) to trust this system.
- Reliability: because a blockchain is distributed, it is always running and available.
- Trust: transactions are immutable and a transaction can not be falsified once confirmed (validated).