Uber and Lyft say they're ending services in Minneapolis over a city-mandated driver pay increase. The city council pushed through the measure to bring driver pay closer to the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.
I have to wonder how hard it would be to build some kind of open source platform to compete with these companies.
I’d have to imagine that the answer to that is “really damn hard”. Look at any Lemmy instance and see how hard it is just to create and maintain an open source “comment section for the internet” platform; now imagine managing thousands of financial transactions on that platform, processing background checks, establishing some sort of trust and security team, and people’s livelihoods depending on that all working reliably all the time.
There’s a reason why only VC-backed companies have managed to get off the ground in this space; it’s hella expensive for a bunch of volunteers to manage.
I’ve always thought that a smart contract system on a blockchain like Ethereum could make for a really good ride share app that’s focused on the drivers running their own independent business.
It would solve the payments problem. It could also automate the requesting and accepting a ride.
The drivers could post their own rates
The contract could take a small fee out of the ride fare to help fund the devs.
And with the latest Ethereum upgrade this week, you could transact for pennies.
I’m still not sure how decentralized trust would work though, and how you’d get licensed.
Real time map updates might be a problem too, but maybe the driver app and rider app could find each other and open a websocket and stream GPS locations peer to peer instead of via any centralized server? This part might be more janky at first vs a central service.
Edit: and the service could run on a stable coin so people aren’t subject to volatility
Edit: just thinking on the GPS… if the driver publicly posts a web socket/api address you can connect to peer to peer, what if it only accepts connections by the current active ride. So the riders wallet signs the app request to open the socket and then the two parties can start sharing their location? That way it only gets shared to the appropriate people. But if a driver wants to know where before accepting, the rider would need to publicly post the where, so maybe you only post to 2mile radius or something, and the actual address gets done peer to peer if accepted?
Edit: also the contracts are open source, it’s the front ends that would be the developers business, and technically anyone could copy the smart contracts and write their own front end to them, and if it took off, I imagine people would eventually write an open source front end as well. It’d help keep costs down as if you were too uncompetitive someone else could enter.
Edit: and if it was just an open source front end, no city would be able to stop it. It’d be forever accessible where someone could post they are available to pick up, and anyone could post they need a ride. Trust wouldn’t even need to be solved by this specifically, trust is a problem other people/business can solve and it just hooks into this.
Hahaha you’re right, it’s still not simple, it just makes the payments and connecting two people easier. The rest is still a lot of work and there are many unclear solutions to some problems.
It does remove all the need for centralized nfrastructure like AWS though which would lower costs
I think something like this though could be the solution to the gig work people getting the shaft. It’d give the power back to them.
I’d have to imagine that the answer to that is “really damn hard”. Look at any Lemmy instance and see how hard it is just to create and maintain an open source “comment section for the internet” platform; now imagine managing thousands of financial transactions on that platform, processing background checks, establishing some sort of trust and security team, and people’s livelihoods depending on that all working reliably all the time.
There’s a reason why only VC-backed companies have managed to get off the ground in this space; it’s hella expensive for a bunch of volunteers to manage.
I’ve always thought that a smart contract system on a blockchain like Ethereum could make for a really good ride share app that’s focused on the drivers running their own independent business.
It would solve the payments problem. It could also automate the requesting and accepting a ride.
The drivers could post their own rates
The contract could take a small fee out of the ride fare to help fund the devs.
And with the latest Ethereum upgrade this week, you could transact for pennies.
I’m still not sure how decentralized trust would work though, and how you’d get licensed.
Real time map updates might be a problem too, but maybe the driver app and rider app could find each other and open a websocket and stream GPS locations peer to peer instead of via any centralized server? This part might be more janky at first vs a central service.
Edit: and the service could run on a stable coin so people aren’t subject to volatility
Edit: just thinking on the GPS… if the driver publicly posts a web socket/api address you can connect to peer to peer, what if it only accepts connections by the current active ride. So the riders wallet signs the app request to open the socket and then the two parties can start sharing their location? That way it only gets shared to the appropriate people. But if a driver wants to know where before accepting, the rider would need to publicly post the where, so maybe you only post to 2mile radius or something, and the actual address gets done peer to peer if accepted?
Edit: also the contracts are open source, it’s the front ends that would be the developers business, and technically anyone could copy the smart contracts and write their own front end to them, and if it took off, I imagine people would eventually write an open source front end as well. It’d help keep costs down as if you were too uncompetitive someone else could enter.
Edit: and if it was just an open source front end, no city would be able to stop it. It’d be forever accessible where someone could post they are available to pick up, and anyone could post they need a ride. Trust wouldn’t even need to be solved by this specifically, trust is a problem other people/business can solve and it just hooks into this.
You’re identifying all the reasons why a team of volunteers haven’t been able to manage such a feat yet.
Hahaha you’re right, it’s still not simple, it just makes the payments and connecting two people easier. The rest is still a lot of work and there are many unclear solutions to some problems.
It does remove all the need for centralized nfrastructure like AWS though which would lower costs
I think something like this though could be the solution to the gig work people getting the shaft. It’d give the power back to them.