8 ms·

What would a decentralised Uber look like?

75 points by edent 4y ago

solarpunk 4y ago
https://libretaxi.org/ https://libretaxi.org/
- edent 4y ago
  "LibreTaxi is open-source Uber proof-of-concept that works through Telegram." So it still relies on a centralised (and proprietary) messaging platform.
- yobbo 4y ago
  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. Either way, it needs to be addressed.
  - rblatz 4y ago
    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.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      Have the platform eat a small percentage. Might as well be just burned.
    - yobbo 4y ago
      Same problem applies to Uber and other services though, although they take a higher "cut".
      - noirbot 4y ago
        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.
yobbo 4y ago
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.
- pyrolistical 4y ago
  That would require a centralized entity like a gov to verify and crypto backed by phone numbers. This would be extremely valuable for many applications
  - amelius 4y ago
    > This would be extremely valuable for many applications Therefore probably hard to design/implement otherwise it would already exist.
    - pyrolistical 4y ago
      No doubt. The gov needs flexibility for various real life exceptions and they wouldn’t want to paint themselves into a rigid crypto protocol
  - yobbo 4y ago
    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. Just one example of how it could work.
- intotheabyss 4y ago
  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. You can trivially implement DIDs on-chain for example https://github.com/uport-project/ethr-didand https://github.com/uport-project/ethr-didand have various levels of centralization and authentication, and then you can also use things like soulbound tokens (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763) or on-chain activity to further correlate someones identity in a more decentralized way. 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.
haltingproblem 4y ago
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]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b1bc25c5-43c8-458d-bdc3-ab66c7cb5ba1 https://www.ft.com/content/b1bc25c5-43c8-458d-bdc3-ab66c7cb5... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oedj_fGXAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oedj_fGXAs [2] https://twitter.com/becknprotocol?lang=en https://twitter.com/becknprotocol?lang=en [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizVoQ1MVmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizVoQ1MVmY
woah 4y ago
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.
- joshribakoff 4y ago
  > 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.
  - acapybara 4y ago
    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.
- acapybara 4y ago
  At the risk of further HN reproach, 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.
herf 4y ago
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.
drewg123 4y ago
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.
- durovo 4y ago
  You can use a service like TaskRabbit for it.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Seems to me one strongly enables the other.
- imadethis 4y ago
  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.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  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?
  - drewg123 4y ago
    Hmm.. Lyft has no option for consumers (though they do have a delivery service open to businesses) Uber has a package delivery option. That actually sounds interesting. I may try that the next time we're at her place.
jrm4 4y ago
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.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  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.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    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.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  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.
raybb 4y ago
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. https://drivers.coop/ https://drivers.coop/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drivers_Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drivers_Cooperative
KaiserPro 4y ago
Decentralised Cabs already exist: 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.)
- edent 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
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bena 4y ago
It would look like a dispatch-only app. 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.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
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.
kornhole 4y ago
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.
- htag 4y ago
  > 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.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    I agree that the service provider/driver needs to be licensed, registered, insured, and accountable. The customer rating system seems optional and not MVP.
- powersnail 4y ago
  > 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.
jmyeet 4y ago
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.
- nine_k 4y ago
  It's not Uber, in the sense that it does not have: - Hailing via an app. - Cost negotiated upfront. - Reputation system. Without that, there's no point.
SkipperCat 4y ago
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".
- lambda 4y ago
  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.
  - weego 4y ago
    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.
    - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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AstixAndBelix 4y ago
"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.
biscottigelato 4y ago
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.

75 points by edent 4y ago

solarpunk 4y ago

https://libretaxi.org/ https://libretaxi.org/

edent 4y ago
"LibreTaxi is open-source Uber proof-of-concept that works through Telegram." So it still relies on a centralised (and proprietary) messaging platform.
yobbo 4y ago
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. Either way, it needs to be addressed.
- rblatz 4y ago
  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.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Have the platform eat a small percentage. Might as well be just burned.
  - yobbo 4y ago
    Same problem applies to Uber and other services though, although they take a higher "cut".
    - noirbot 4y ago
      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.

yobbo 4y ago

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.

pyrolistical 4y ago
That would require a centralized entity like a gov to verify and crypto backed by phone numbers. This would be extremely valuable for many applications
- amelius 4y ago
  > This would be extremely valuable for many applications Therefore probably hard to design/implement otherwise it would already exist.
  - pyrolistical 4y ago
    No doubt. The gov needs flexibility for various real life exceptions and they wouldn’t want to paint themselves into a rigid crypto protocol
- yobbo 4y ago
  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. Just one example of how it could work.
intotheabyss 4y ago
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. You can trivially implement DIDs on-chain for example https://github.com/uport-project/ethr-didand https://github.com/uport-project/ethr-didand have various levels of centralization and authentication, and then you can also use things like soulbound tokens (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763) or on-chain activity to further correlate someones identity in a more decentralized way. 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.

haltingproblem 4y ago

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]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/b1bc25c5-43c8-458d-bdc3-ab66c7cb5ba1 https://www.ft.com/content/b1bc25c5-43c8-458d-bdc3-ab66c7cb5... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oedj_fGXAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oedj_fGXAs [2] https://twitter.com/becknprotocol?lang=en https://twitter.com/becknprotocol?lang=en [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizVoQ1MVmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizVoQ1MVmY

woah 4y ago

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.

joshribakoff 4y ago
> 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.
- acapybara 4y ago
  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.
acapybara 4y ago
At the risk of further HN reproach, 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.

herf 4y ago

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.

drewg123 4y ago

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.

durovo 4y ago
You can use a service like TaskRabbit for it.
jrm4 4y ago
Seems to me one strongly enables the other.
imadethis 4y ago
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.
notpushkin 4y ago
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?
- drewg123 4y ago
  Hmm.. Lyft has no option for consumers (though they do have a delivery service open to businesses) Uber has a package delivery option. That actually sounds interesting. I may try that the next time we're at her place.

jrm4 4y ago

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.

maxerickson 4y ago
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.
- jrm4 4y ago
  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.
mgraczyk 4y ago
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.

raybb 4y ago

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. https://drivers.coop/ https://drivers.coop/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drivers_Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drivers_Cooperative

KaiserPro 4y ago

Decentralised Cabs already exist: 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.)

edent 4y ago
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.

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bena 4y ago

It would look like a dispatch-only app. 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.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

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.

kornhole 4y ago

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.

htag 4y ago
> 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.
- kornhole 4y ago
  I agree that the service provider/driver needs to be licensed, registered, insured, and accountable. The customer rating system seems optional and not MVP.
powersnail 4y ago
> 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.

jmyeet 4y ago

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.

nine_k 4y ago
It's not Uber, in the sense that it does not have: - Hailing via an app. - Cost negotiated upfront. - Reputation system. Without that, there's no point.

SkipperCat 4y ago

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".

lambda 4y ago
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.
- weego 4y ago
  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.
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AstixAndBelix 4y ago

"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.

biscottigelato 4y ago

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.