[yuvalr1]

The sole problem crypto currency solves is the problem of centralization. Regarding the Airbnb case, why would people want to pay the Airbnb commission when they can have direct payment and bookkeeping using the blockchain?

Of course there are still the (important) issues of disputes, insurance etc. that are provided by the centralized entity. These might be solved in the future and might be not.

[adventured]

In the absence of a central host, who is hosting the media? In the near future that's likely to include advances around AR/VR, which will significantly increase the burden on infrastructure.

Who provides a trusted system of reviews? Who hosts/controls those? What's the basis of trusting those to be legitimate users/customers? Who foots the bill for the site (or similar) that enables organized browsing of all listings, searching, information presentation, et al.? How do you force coordination on that if it's decentralized? How do you then keep that decision committee from becoming the central authority all over again? This is the libertarian anarchy problem, where you will always end up right back with some center power structure that becomes dominate.

There are a vast number of problems that Airbnb solves that you're leaving out.

There is no scenario where decentralized wins. The extreme majority of users do not care about decentralization, it is meaningless to them. They want a trusted central authority to hold responsible, complain to, sue, whatever.

[janoc]

What's even worse, even the payment issue is solved and nobody is forced to go through Airbnb for that.

There is Paypal, Moneygram, Western Union, there are direct wire transfers, in many countries you can pay by cheque, you can do a direct deposit ... And all of these work with your existing cash and credit cards and don't require knowledge how to set up a Bitcoin (or whatever-coin) wallet and how to use it and how not to get scammed.

It is literally a solution looking for a problem hoping to cash on the crypto craze (adding -coin to anything is a sure way to get funded/bought/have your stock price soar up).

[usrusr]

Roaming between "regional ubers" might be such a thing, where the day to day business runs centrally within each regional system, but profile access and payment forwarding for roaming is "cryptoed". I don't really see why that would absolutely need a full blockchain though, as there are only so many things you could meaningfully cosign with three parties involved (assuming drivers don't roam). Bbut maybe I missed something that would need getting written into a public blockchain, maybe for establishing the required trust network between providers.

But this would have to come into existence with all the lack of glamour as any dry old industry standard, the whole scenario contains absolutely no room for a starry-eyed "Uber on blockchain!" startup (which are doubtlessly legion).

[joejerryronnie]

Ah, but the libertarian anarchy solution is to wait until the dominant central power structure is your group and then declare all problems solved and fight vigorously for the status quo.

[jasonlaramburu]

Governments also prefer having a trusted ‘central’ authority to sue and censor. This way they can force ‘illegal’ listings off the platform.

[thisisit]

> why would people want to pay the Airbnb commission when they can have direct payment and bookkeeping using the blockchain?

Well, how is that possible when this page says?

https://www.cryptocribs.com/whyhost

CryptoCribs handles all the crypto payments for you. All we need is your public BTC and ETH address

And I doubt there are no commissions involved for handling payments.