Let's talk Decentralization!
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Here’s an update for you from my last meeting with Mr. Nick Szabo - The architecture has been finalised, stakeholders have showed their interest by corroborating the idea of a decentralised city and the Kebab’s were delicious - a scintillating conversation indeed!
Let me brief the ardent followers of this newsletter about on of the several features of the decentralized city that is being developed on Mars.
I believe everyone reading this has used Uber/Ola once in their Life. Today Uber/Ola or as a matter of fact any cab related service has a large market base, provides services to a larger audience and is one of the simplest examples of IOT. First of all it is important to have a high level view of how the system actually works before realising the need of decentralization.
You open the app, place a request for the cab and your request is sent to the company. Uber sends a vehicle to you and you pay them the money (to Uber but not the driver). Uber takes its commission and pay the driver for that ride. Fair enough? It look’s pretty simple. Right? But there are some major flaws in this process and I believe you too have been a part of this experience.
Firstly, since there is an involvement of a third party (which ensures the trust) between you and the driver, you have to pay an extra amount as a commission to that third party. Hence you end up paying more. Secondly, you could always be a victim of price surging and there is no transparency as to what is the business model behind this. Again you end up paying more. Thirdly, it is a centralized system where you are providing the third party with your details and they are storing it with them which undermines privacy. Fourthly, The company has to keep a regular check on the drivers as sometimes they can be rude and demeaning. The question is — How can these problems be solved?
Blockchain as a technology has all the attributes that can provide the solution to the above discussed problems. Blockchain is a decentralized, P2P network. Decentralizing the system would help the riders to directly contact the users and dismiss all the possibilities of a third party. Thus making the whole process cost effective and transparent. Since the ledger is shared across all the nodes in the network it also makes the system fully secured. Hence undermining all the security and privacy related issues. With cryptocurrencies making a space for themselves, payments can easily be done via Ethereum on the Blockchain. The only problem that persists is to make the system user friendly. Applications build on Web3 are not as user friendly as compared to the current centralised applications.
Fun Fact: Arcade city , a company started by a frustrated Uber driver named David is already giving Uber a strong run in this business. And who knowns, maybe tomorrow the whole system is decentralised. This is something to ponder upon!
See you next month :)
Fond adieu!
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