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Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment. These are companies that mostly just serve as middlemen. They could theoretically be entirely decentralized enabling people to genuinely connect directly with other people to offer a service. There are even technological solutions towards avoiding bad actors and abuse. For instance mutual facial recognition to ensure people are who they say they are - when you get in a ride, you and the driver both snap a pic of each other, it's verified on both ends, and off you both go. And all metainformation could be publicly stored in a trustless append-only decentralized ledger.

They're just the early middlemen of budding industries that, in an optimistic future, will not even need middlemen.

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They're protocol. Without a trusted party in the middle, there isn't a market.

...which makes me wonder if maybe the blockchain aficionados are onto something. The problem that blockchains solve is precisely to replace the "trusted middlemen" with a distributed network of miners and coin-holders, and to split the rewards that would accrue to them across a competitive market. If every Internet marketplace were replaced with a smart contract, that's a massive potential market.

Yip. In my opinion this is the real future of blockchains. There are even incredible possibilities like connecting decentralized services to create new businesses. Imagine a digital farmers' market that directly connects consumer to farmer using our decentralized vehicle transport service.

Only problem is that this/these sort of project(s) would entail an enormous amount of energy and effort to develop. And then you'd also need to ensure you have sufficient marketing clout so it doesn't just lay dormant. And then in the end it's a completely decentralized system. The idea of a creator sitting around skimming money off every transaction is not really part of this picture.

So it's not really the most enticing of projects to take on. Big investment, minimal personal reward. On the other hand, I think it will happen - eventually. We just need another Tim Berners-Lee type individual. Except preferably one that happens to be a brilliant engineer, salesperson, and billionaire.

I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment

They are not “sharing” anything in the sense that people normally understand the word. Money is exchanged for services, as normal. The only thing they do differently is evade regulations and taxes.

As lallysingh noted just above, Uber and AirBnB are brokers.

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