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I used to work in large scale eCommerce too, I would never claim distributed supply chains is trivial. But this was not in reply open source Amazon, this was a reply to the idea of a distributed Uber (the parent comment to mine).

That to me, feels quite in line with Web3's capabilities. The hard problems to me don't seem to be technical in nature. I think the bigger hurdles will be business related. But this is a tech conversation, so here is my thoughts.

The way I see it, Uber enables 3 primary capabilities, for which it takes a major cut, and commands total control over drivers:

1. Driver Ratings

2. Payments

3. Match Making

I think web3 can solve 1 and 2 on-chain using smart contracts relatively simply. and if you use a chain like Avalanche, it can be done with low fees (cents) and with fast transaction finality (seconds).

The match making capability should not be on chain. For that i'd design a simple rest API using traditional technologies that consumes configuration from the chain. This service can be deployed on Akash, and paid for by taking a small cut off each transaction or devaluing a utility token... i'd build a DAO to govern the whole thing, and i'd distributes votes based on activity in the drivers pool.

Are there probably problems here? yeah, this is 3 minutes of thought. But i'm sure if I cared to, I could design a functional system in a weekend.




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