I try not to. But when someone claims that building a platform for distributed, cooperative, coordinated action is "trivial", and it's in the context of "I'm building an open source Amazon", it is a little hard not to fail at this goal.
I used to work in large scale eCommerce too, I would never claim distributed supply chains is trivial. But this was not in reply open source Amazon, this was a reply to the idea of a distributed Uber (the parent comment to mine).
That to me, feels quite in line with Web3's capabilities. The hard problems to me don't seem to be technical in nature. I think the bigger hurdles will be business related. But this is a tech conversation, so here is my thoughts.
The way I see it, Uber enables 3 primary capabilities, for which it takes a major cut, and commands total control over drivers:
1. Driver Ratings
2. Payments
3. Match Making
I think web3 can solve 1 and 2 on-chain using smart contracts relatively simply. and if you use a chain like Avalanche, it can be done with low fees (cents) and with fast transaction finality (seconds).
The match making capability should not be on chain. For that i'd design a simple rest API using traditional technologies that consumes configuration from the chain. This service can be deployed on Akash, and paid for by taking a small cut off each transaction or devaluing a utility token... i'd build a DAO to govern the whole thing, and i'd distributes votes based on activity in the drivers pool.
Are there probably problems here? yeah, this is 3 minutes of thought. But i'm sure if I cared to, I could design a functional system in a weekend.
I try not to. But when someone claims that building a platform for distributed, cooperative, coordinated action is "trivial", and it's in the context of "I'm building an open source Amazon", it is a little hard not to fail at this goal.
I used to work in large scale eCommerce too, I would never claim distributed supply chains is trivial. But this was not in reply open source Amazon, this was a reply to the idea of a distributed Uber (the parent comment to mine).
That to me, feels quite in line with Web3's capabilities. The hard problems to me don't seem to be technical in nature. I think the bigger hurdles will be business related. But this is a tech conversation, so here is my thoughts.
The way I see it, Uber enables 3 primary capabilities, for which it takes a major cut, and commands total control over drivers:
1. Driver Ratings
2. Payments
3. Match Making
I think web3 can solve 1 and 2 on-chain using smart contracts relatively simply. and if you use a chain like Avalanche, it can be done with low fees (cents) and with fast transaction finality (seconds).
The match making capability should not be on chain. For that i'd design a simple rest API using traditional technologies that consumes configuration from the chain. This service can be deployed on Akash, and paid for by taking a small cut off each transaction or devaluing a utility token... i'd build a DAO to govern the whole thing, and i'd distributes votes based on activity in the drivers pool.
Are there probably problems here? yeah, this is 3 minutes of thought. But i'm sure if I cared to, I could design a functional system in a weekend.