[contingencies]

Ditto. IMHO their business model isn't hard to replicate, they didn't invent it, and their biggest asset is inertia-eyeballs. Although they are a YC darling, the fact is they scaled with loads of marketing dollar versus established competition (eg. in Europe) and what this shows us is huge financial backing and aggressive media engagement can create a sector-specific behemoth. For all intents and purposes in the current world it has already plateaued, though. There's a school of thought that they are probably one of the last paper-valuation giants to climb out of the centralized marketplace world.

In future, perhaps consumers won't use branded marketplace apps and will instead publish data independently, branded search engine apps will rank and return it and third party reputation services will assist with filtering. Why? Because nobody wants a damn middleman app demanding its own permissions/login/customer service loop for everything they do, and people are slowly ceding anonymity for promises of assurance as the resource-constrained, higher-density, more urban world moves toward the political right.

A cryptocurrency AirBNB clone could take a serious chunk out of their market, since so many hosts are flying close to or beyond the legal or strata relations radar and would prefer not to declare earnings.

[rorykoehler]

I doubt that will take off purely due to the comfort of having someone to call if things go wrong. It may work in other industries where the cost of failure is lower (eg taxis/uber) but not for short term accommodation.

[contingencies]

It's inevitable that a trust implementation outside of marketplace services eventually dominates. This removes most of their value add.

[ggg9990]

That’s not necessarily inevitable since a large part of what makes marketplace trust metrics hard to game is that it costs a lot of money to drive fake transactions through it, since the marketplace will be taking its cut each time.

[whataretensors]

There are clever solutions to this. Escrow works even in bitcoin. Then at a certain point you call the police. No reason to insert a hugely expensive third party in a 2 party transaction.

Edit: It's more than one hugely expensive third party if you consider each level of local government gets involved.

[BlackjackCF]

Looks like The Bee Token is already on it: https://www.beetoken.com/