Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis if the mayor signs a minimum wage bill for drivers - Infosec.Pub
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Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis if the mayor signs a minimum wage bill for drivers::Lyft and Uber threatened to stop doing business in Minneapolis after the city council adopted a new rule Thursday that would set a minimum wage for rideshare drivers.

I made this comment in the thread of this story.

Probably a very unpopular thing to say: It would be interesting to see a middleman-free, decentralized version of Lyft/Uber where payments and ride-hailing are done with crypto and blockchain/smart contracts, driver ID’s using using DID’s, anonymized on-chain using homomorphic encryption. The hardest problem that I forsee with that tech is with dispute resolution. The idea stems from the opinion that the gig economy is great but the real problem (in matters not related to conflict resolution) is that the middleman takes a huge cut of the fare in exchange for doing almost nothing.

I was hoping that we could have a discussion about the pro’s and cons of a crypto implementation of ride-sharing apps like Lyft and Uber.

For me, I don’t think we’ll see any implementation of this idea anytime soon because there are a lot of near-impossible issues for a decentralized organization to deal with in regards to conflict resolution.

However from my perspective, almost all other aspects of this tech seem to benefit from the elimination of a greedy middleman that does nothing other than connect two independent parties (one looking to get hired to drive and the other looking to get a ride in exchange for money).

  • meyotch@slrpnk.net
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for clarifying! The devil is certainly in the details. Worth hashing out.

    Thanks for pointing out how cryptocurrency might be used to incentivize running a server to enable “p2p” ride sharing. I mean it’s not exactly p2p if there’s a server in the middle, but that’s how it would appear to riders and drivers ideally.

    As a non sequitur, everyone always forgets about craigslist. They are still around and are quite active, not the same as in the early days but craigslist is still a viable concern.

    There’s nothing fancy or exotic about their tech, the innovation and disruption came from the business model alone. Just throwing that out there as an appeal for simplicity and a discussion point. Maybe follow a craigslist model and charge a small fee for commercial load-sharing and the personal ride-shares can free-ride on the same infrastructure?

    I have a bias toward simplifying big ideas as much as possible. The main challenge with a cryptocurrency based approach is you have to have mass adoption of two big new ideas at the same time: crypto and decentralized ride-sharing.

    Again, great discussion point. I want this idea to take root so I am just being a devil’s advocate. I realize this is a cardano forum, so naturally the audience will like the application of cryptocurrency.

    • demesisx@infosec.pubOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      no problem! I will edit this comment more later but I have a big smile on my face because you come from the same spirit of intellectual honesty and idealistic curiosity that I do.

      In the vast possibilities of technological evolution, should an innovation emerge that propels us closer to a truly egalitarian civilization, whether it be cryptocurrency or of some other nature, it is the outcome, not the medium, that truly resonates with me.

      • meyotch@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Ha! Looking forward to it. It would be interesting to cross post or repost this in different communities to get different audiences.

        I could see Minneapolis saying ‘byeeee’ to Uber and making a public service. That isn’t much different from governments giving out taxi medallions, save that they hopefully wouldn’t limit the supply to create artificial scarcity.

        Anyhow, good times!