When I first heard about Zip Car I thought we needed a generalized platform for individuals to share not just cars, but tools and other things, rather than everyone have to buy their own, or rent from “BigCorp” companies.
Now we are a step closer to a generalised sharing and/or trading platform with services like Uber, Airbnb, and now a reinvented TaskRabbit (see article link below) and I hope SAFE will take us to the logical conclusion of this vision: decentralized sharing/market platforms where the benefits are entirely with the users and not syphoned off, or where users’ data is exploited by a controlling core, where human weaknesses and structural vulnerabilities create potential for letting down the whole.
This article about TaskRabbit’s transformation illustrates the opportunity for SAFE to enable these models to become truly peer-to-peer, and to incorporate the “can’t do evil” principles of decentralised control and trust in logic and code, rather than people.
Hmm, Imagine allowing your things to be shared and receiving “credits” for doing so (maybe a P2PE coin, or work safecoins into it somehow) that you can then use to “rent” other people’s stuff that is avail. You might do it all as a totally free service but incentivising it might be huge.
Question: How can you do POR so people can’t game the system. (ie two buddies claim they are trading stuff out while not really doing it)?
I was thinking about this the other day, since a lot of those services are kinda centralized decentralization.
The only thing I was struggling with was liability. Unlike other services, I WANT Uber and Lyft to track me. I want them to know where I am and who I’m with, because I’m in a deadly vehicle (vehicles are like giant weapon!) with a stranger. If given the choice between Super Cheap Decentralized Car Service, or Centralized Car Service with Liability, I personally would go with the latter.
I’ve never heard of TaskRabbit, reading about them now. Neat sound service.