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Isn't the trust in those services more at the physical world level than the technical level?

Yes, but the idea is now we can remove the custodians out of the mix. Why pay airbnb? The networking, booking, hopefully identity verification can all be done p2p

I think a big problem with these services is that your rating belongs to Uber instead of the user. It would be nice to put your reputation from all the services you use (Uber, Airbnb, reddit karma, eBay, credit rating, etc) in one central place that is not controlled by a single corporation.

The dream it's to then be able to share a portion of your information with another party without revealing everything. For example, you can share "my credit rating is above 750 and I'm 32 years old" and nothing else. This can be accomplished with zero knowledge proofs which are going to be possible on Ethereum later this year.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

Edit: There does seem to be a bootstrapping issue though. Right now the centralized entity is basically vouching for new people until their individual reputation builds.

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