[danielnaab]

Interesting observations on the dynamic with "real cabbies."

I would envision a decentralized system including both "real cabs", whose parent company vouches for a driver's licensing, as well as independent drivers, whose insurance company does. But if any driver participated in a transparent network, their reputation would be important to them, and I would assume that would be a deterrent to taking fares you don't actually intend to pick up.

[aetherson]

Well... I mean, it depends on how you do reputation.

Passengers do not by-and-large want to page through a list of cabbies and try to trade off the reputation of the person versus how far away they are or whatever.

Uber gives its reputation system some bite by just delisting drivers who fall below some rating system (and probably by threatening to do so considerably before they actually do so), and that's more-or-less what we did at Flywheel as well. But how does a decentralized system do that? For that matter, how does a decentralized system prevent the driver from just giving themselves a good rating by creating some dummy passenger accounts and upvoting themselves?

The reputation system also sort of implicitly depends on you having a working system that gets a substantial volume of rides. But the most vulnerable time for a TNC is right when you're starting out. You need to gain your users' trust, and that means getting them rides promptly the first few times they use you.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, and for the record I don't think that Uber has a "natural monopoly." I actually wouldn't invest in Uber precisely because I don't think they have any way to protect any profit margin they have. But mostly because I kind of expect that if Uber ever really demonstrates that they can actually make a decent margin, Amazon will come in and clone the service, not because you can do it with OSS.

[danielnaab]

The software agent that consumers interact with would have to be responsible for determining the accuracy of ratings.

I suspect that the most important aspect of such a system would be trusted participants: eg, insurance companies, city licensing agencies, etc. If you get one hundred great, but fake, reviews from shell accounts, it would be rather meaningless if your city didn't issue you a license on the blockchain, or you claimed false insurance which was somehow disputed on the same blockchain by the legitimate insurer.

[bfung]

What's in it for the insurance company to do this blockchain activity? What's in it for the city? They're not going to do this for nothing. And whatever entity that will help get this to work - wouldn't they be the next "uber"?

If the city is "issuing" licenses on a blockchain, how is this different than the medallion system already in use?