Comment by klodolph
1 year ago
I see the reason for the middle man is to:
1. develop the platform
2. set standards for what “delivery” is
3. be liable for orders not delivered, or orders fraudulently placed
With a P2P app, wouldn’t you be engaging with a courier directly? That would mean that any problems would have to be taken up with the courier, I would think. It makes sense for restaurants to engage directly with couriers because they may have enough volume and repeat business that they can vet the couriers. But it does not make sense to me for individuals to engage with couriers directly, not for small-value items like meals.
Also payment processing. One charge to credit card or whatever is much simpler than having to individually send payment to first restaurant and then to courier.
With a business account it's even better. Where I work we get one electronic invoice at the end of the month that is automatically paid and entered into the accounting system with the correct VAT code for all purchases and deliveries that month. The savings compared to processing 20/40x traditional charges is way more than what they charge.
In principle, you could have independent review services that publish ratings for couriers. Perhaps they could even make money insuring orders. But then this would run into just the same levels of frustrating opaqueness from the couriers' perspective.
P2P app could display (orders taken ever), (orders successfully delivered) for every courier. That would be good enough for 90% of costumers, but wouldn't cover the cost of actual fraud for the client.
Is there something stopping a malicious peer client from lying about those numbers?
Genuinely curious; I've been wondering about how to make a zero-knowledge P2P protocol for turn-based imperfect knowledge games and this sounds directly applicable to that.
I would imagine that would be tracked by a crypto ledger, externally. Customer payment confirmation hashed with timestamp, driver's info, restaurant info, order info and of course the previous ledger block. Who would hash it (compute)? The same devices that run the app I imagine.
I disagree with that—I don’t think it would be good enough for 90% of customers. I think it would be about the reverse. Maybe it would be good enough for 10% of customers.