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Comment by tracedddd | Hacker News Reader

I believe in cryptocurrency/blockchain, but your examples illuminate why speculation is far ahead of application. Why would an Uber driver want to auction their time on a blockchain? How would making Airbnb houses NFTs have any advantage to a consumer versus a centralized approach? Needlessly complicated, less quality control, less safety. Centralized is truly better for these in every way.

The fact is that 99% of the perceived uses are simply riding the hype train for investment. The 1% is really changing things, despite all the haters, but it’s typically finance, currency, settlement, etc.

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Because Uber and Lyft extract much of the value from each ride. If Uber or Lyft were a blockchain-based peer-to-peer protocol with its own utility token, the users and the drivers could easily benefit from the value capture. For what it's worth I think the decentralized Uber example is a bit contrived and that these applications are more complex than people realize. However, ultimately that's what I see in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps: I see loans being made via a smart contract that automates away much of the middle man infrastructure of the banking system. And therefore I as a depositor can get a higher yield than I can at a regular bank because the only thing between me and the borrower is code.

I'm not convinced that centralized is better in every way for the more complex examples, however. I just think the tooling and distribution aren't quite there yet. And sometimes it will take a rethink of the existing application. For example, Uniswap is a great decentralized exchange, but the constant product architecture it used to achieve its result is much different than the standard order book architecture that centralized exchanges use.

Yep I think it's tooling, tech. Ubercoin and Airbnbcoin type apps are inevitable I think. There's no reason for all drivers to give away their time at a fixed cost for Uber, and auctions would allow 5 star drivers to gain a lot more than 4 star drivers, even 4.8 star drivers. Uber doesn't allow for this, but that's the thing with permission-less innovation - you will be allowed to do stuff people can't even imagine right now.

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