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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

i thought about this recently too. the technological complexities are not trivial, but they're dwarfed by the operational, marketing, and regulatory ones. for instance, who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?

i'd love to organize/contribute to something like this, but it has some serious hurdles to think through.

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Even the technical challenges are significant. It's one thing to make an app, it's another thing to have a 24/7, global, distributed application with lots of money running through it. You'll need site-reliability teams to handle maintenance issues and a significant number of developers on staff. If there's some new law, regulation, or bug which requires changes to your system it needs to be done NOW, not whenever someone gets around to it.

>who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?

Lawyers. You're going to need a lot of lawyers.

yes, i didn't mean to imply that the technical challenges weren't substantial. real-time matching and routing are also not trivial.

Would be cool to have an open protocol where anyone can make an app to hook people up P2P.

> who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various parties?

If it's P2P, then the same as any other P2P transaction. If I pay a random dude to deliver my lunch, and he assaults me, this is handled by the local police. It's a risk I'm willing to take if I choose to trust him. A distributed trust system w/ reviews will help make things safer.

I feel like sometimes we seek 100% safety in a world where that's not possible, and when it DOES happen we point fingers. With a middleman like Uber we can point fingers more easily, but ultimately we're responsible for ourselves.

> who sets up payments and issues refunds?

There are public escrow services such as escrow.com that could be integrated. And there's always cryptocurrency.

i like p2p as the default, but i'm not as confident that the liabilities go away so easily with that configuration.

totally agree that the world is full of risks and sometimes we just have to accept them.

escrow in some form would likely be necessary, but the fees of escrow.com are prohibitive for this use case.

instead of pricing being controlled by the marketplace, it'd be cool if it were more like a trading platform where riders bid for rides and drivers offer rides (with considerations for starting point, distance, and trip time).

Call me a cynic, but I'll just let Doordash take the overhead fees if it means I can avoid a call to the police and an escrow service for a $15 burrito.

Best of luck on your OSS endevor.

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