Could a mysterious cryptographic ledger replace Uber, Spotify and AirBnB?

The technology behind Bitcoin has unleashed a wave of high-tech idealism that promises to end centralized services as we know them.

The wheels have been put down! As your plane approaches the gate, you take out your phone and call a car to rush to the room near the morning meeting. Your car arrives, and you habitually sit in the back seat, put on your headphones, tune out the hustle and bustle, and immerse yourself in your own music world.

To get to this average meeting today, you’d probably rely on iconic economy apps like Uber, AirBNB, and Spotify every step of the way. Living in the future sure is great!

But what if it’s 2025 instead of 2015, and you immediately find yourself hiring and paying for all of these services without going through any kind of company? What if all of these services are merged into a protocol-to-protocol network, like email or the web, rather than company-to-company? And what if all of these relationships are managed autonomously by high-level mathematical programs running on distributed computing engines, without the control of any individual or single organization?

This vision of platforms without platforms has been on the minds of many people, from “one island per person” libertarians to leftist anarchists. It has not yet dominated the current tech industry, which is full of centralized competing platforms that offer free services and then sell ads or data to make money. But it has a big chance of winning: the rise of the internet itself, where all businesses, organizations, and individuals are connected and can do business directly with each other, without having to ask for permission from app store managers or pay authoritarian managers for permission.

It was nearly impossible for the average person to process the daunting depths of the subject matter, and the Internet became popular only after its complexity was transformed into the more user-friendly domain name system and the World Wide Web. The network we now use is so widespread and productive, it gives participants more freedom, more choice, and more human diversity than any private tool that came before it, and major businesses like AOL and computer services companies had to adopt it or die.

Now, a new wave of tech dreamers is betting that we can do the same thing again, this time transforming the admittedly complex mechanisms that make up the digital currency Bitcoin into a more user-friendly system that can help call a car, book a room, and pay for your personalized music. At the heart of all these dreams is the blockchain. Today, it makes Bitcoin possible; tomorrow, it will be part of your life.

A blockchain is a cryptographically protected shared database — a protected public ledger that anyone (with the right skills and tools) can use. Once information is written to a blockchain, anyone can view it, and it is nearly impossible to change it. The most widely used blockchain today is the one that records bitcoin transactions and protects bitcoins from being illegally copied. This is called "solving the double-spending problem," and while blockchains are not infallible, they are a particularly elegant and effective technology. There's no reason why blockchains can't be used for other purposes — anything that requires a public record that anyone can extend but no one can tamper with: think smart property rights, personal identity verification, real estate registries, and so on.

There is no shortage of startups, projects, and developers trying to apply blockchain concepts to everything, primarily because it brings something the tech industry has long dreamed of: decentralization.

"What Bitcoin does at its core is create a currency and accounting system that doesn't require people to trust a central authority like the Federal Reserve," explains Rachel O'Dwyer, a core member of the P2P Foundation and a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin.

Blockchain provides “a distributed system for collaborating with people we don’t know or trust, for sharing knowledge, making decisions, developing transparent systems, and more.”

For as long as there have been computer networks, they have disintermediated businesses and institutions and connected them directly to individuals. And it’s true! Many examples of disintermediation have already occurred. But every time you gain a little bit of decentralization, an equal and opposite reaction kicks in — you could call it “direct empowerment.” The digital innovators in our lives, like the bird-faced Portlandia fashion, often have a plan to improve everything: “Put a catalog on it!”

In a sense, this push for direct empowerment is understandable. Yes, you can empower individuals to do everything in a peer-to-peer fashion, but they still have to locate someone else, right? What the industry calls “discovery” is hard. Uber still looks for its drivers on Craigslist.

Someone has to keep track of who's where to help you find what you need. So every time someone starts peer-to-peer, someone else comes along and starts making things easier by creating a directory or index. Think Yahoo circa 1995, or Google circa 2000. BitTorrent is a file sharing technology that doesn't require a central server, but we still use The Pirate Bay and Popcorn because they're so convenient.

At its core, every platform today — Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb, and others — is just a glorified listing service that leverages some real-time connections, trust systems, and transactional tools. These services provide a helpful entry point for people who want to take a ride or book a room. Once you put a directory on something, you’ve created a great business opportunity — a magnet that pulls together articles that are scattered across the web.

Blockchain, as code and as a concept, is and will continue to show us how far decentralization can be pushed. Can we share data without permission? Is it possible to decentralize a service all the way without a central authority? We know that Uber will soon use software (e.g., self-driving systems) to eliminate drivers; will software eliminate Uber in turn? Is there a decentralization line beyond which platforms disappear and we are all connected?

The logical answer to all these questions is: Not yet. Not for a long time. But a man can dream, can't he?

There are two dream instances.

Last year, DA Wallach published these articles, arguing that blockchain has the potential to disrupt the music industry: Digital music files start to be authenticated using Bitcoin-style methods, and copyright information is attached, and you can even create a system that automatically pays the owner. Micropayments that do not violate DRM regulations! Cool — but it’s not just about downloading an app to get started.

A British music entrepreneur named Phil Barry — who worked with radio singer Thom Yorke on and released a BitTorrent-powered solo album last year — read Wallach's article and, like many others, decided it would either revive the music industry or kill it. Either way, he didn't care; he was interested in how technology could improve many musicians, and he wanted to explore what it would take to implement the system Wallach described.

“Very quickly,” Barry recalls, “it went from a vague idea to serious discussions.” He began working with ConsenSys, an incubator for projects based on the Ethereum platform. Barry named his project Ujo Music. (Ujo means “collection” in the world language, he explains.)

Around the same time, singer- songwriter Imogen Heap, who had been working on a sideline in music tech, began publicly discussing the concept of a blockchain-based music copyright and credit system called Mycelia. “Her description was very creative and artistic, and very similar to what we were trying to do from a utility perspective,” Barry says. The two discussed it, and Heap released a number of digital versions of a song called “Tiny Human” in September, one of which was a prototype for Barry’s Ujo music system. As Barry says, when people pay for downloads, “they can see that the money went to the right people.”

Of course, they need some Ethereum’s virtual currency, ether, to buy the music. Since most of us don’t have ether, Barry readily admits that the sales of “Tiny Human” are very rare: “I think it’s like the first or second time you can send ether in the real world.” Because the record of every transaction is public, you can check them, Ujo wrote on its website: At the time of writing, “Tiny Human” has been downloaded 100 times, which means Heap has made $98.

Ujo’s prototype also demonstrates some other advanced features, such as the ability to break songs down into separate tracks (or “stems”) for relicensing and remixing. Ultimately, Ujo envisions a self-governing system of “smart contracts” — self-executing agreements in software that automatically handle the very complex and messy business of music copyright, licensing, and payments. In the long run, proponents of such a system see it not only as a way to ensure that artists get paid for their own creations, but also as a way to open up the current copyright status quo, in which if you want a sample, you have to pay for it or get it illegally. The broader vision is to cryptographically tie music, and ultimately all creative work, to the people who made it — to the author’s bank account.

Barry says the music industry is paying attention: “We’ve been contacted by a lot of senior people in the big PROs [performing rights organizations].” He’s not sure whether they’re interested in getting involved or just checking out potential competition. “Maybe they just feel the need to at least show a willingness to work with new technology. At the same time, if Ujo is a sign of things to come, where large parts of the music industry will cease to exist or will be radically transformed, it could be that they’re taking precautionary steps to see how dangerous it is.” In an alternate future where blockchain disrupts centralized platforms, take a trip to Israel, where a multi-partner car-sharing service has been dubbed the “anti-Uber.” In La’Zooz’s envisioned future, when you need a ride, your phone will connect you with someone nearby who’s looking to get to the same destination. In other words, it’s true “real-time ride-sharing,” not an app-driven taxi company. (You could also call it “the ride-hailing app that was once called rideshare.”)

After years of planning and a crowdfunding sale last summer, La'Zooz now has a working Android app, but only in a small pilot in Israel. You can't actually use it to hail a ride yet. The La'Zooz system pays drivers in its own currency (called "zooz"), and now La'Zooz users can earn (or "mine") zooz by allowing the app to track their location. La'Zooz's developers see it as a way to achieve the "critical density of active users" it needs, which is useful for people who want to take a ride — and it also spreads some zooz around widely, so people can pay for their rides once they've been there.

Currently, La'Zooz's website reports a community of more than 3,000 users worldwide, so "critical density" is a good way to put it. The open-source software is developed primarily by a core team of six contributors. I asked one of the developers, Eitan Katchka, about the roadmap for the project, but he wasn't very optimistic. Last summer's crowdfunding campaign also didn't reach the goal needed to develop an iOS app, and Katchka said the team is considering "changing direction."

Despite his pessimism, he remains enthusiastic about the concept. "The job of La'Zooz and other projects like this is to show that it's possible to have services like this in a life without a central authority or without a central authority that recognizes the importance of the people who created the network," he said. "I always tell people who are skeptical about these things - how would you explain 'email' to your neighbor back in 1994?"

The exciting thing is that La'Zooz makes a lot of sense. The frustrating thing is that it's too idealistic — that's the word they use to describe La'Zooz whenever I talk to experts in this field. Maybe this project is too hard to achieve. Maybe, as Kataka said, "beautiful work" will take many years to complete.

Ujo and La'Zooz are early examples of some of the popular concepts in blockchain circulation, and one more thing: I have been hesitant to use these words to avoid acronyms and buzzwords. What I am talking about are some of the d-words in the Bitcoin space: Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC), Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), Decentralized Cooperative Organization (DCO), etc.

All of these are different flavors of the code-driven, central-office-free concept. Each organization that uses these words means something slightly different, and at this stage they’re mostly theoretical, so concrete examples are hard to find. If Ujo’s smart contracts can be used as a mechanism to pay music rights, the network formed would be something like a DAC or DAO. La’Zooz goes beyond the DCO concept; it calls itself a “decentralized transportation platform owned by the community.”

There’s a common thread running through these concepts: They all seek to move market relations away from the old rent-seeking, monopolistic platforms. This concept has broad applicability, inspiring many imaginative proposals — such as “disrupt Reddit with Bitcoin.”

If autonomous code can start processing transactions and other things at an incredible speed and scope, we will need to start thinking about the difference between code that lets us do things and code that does things for us. The structure and design of software-based services have powerful and sometimes unpredictable side effects on the real world. Look at how Uber's customer rating system turns customers into middle managers and puts smiles on drivers' faces.

We know that automated trading markets can quickly become the source of all the harm — bots, spam, and fraud. One market we know well has become a place for real-time micro-auctions — online advertising — and its case does not inspire hope. Every time we add monetary value to the web, such as Google's automated historical ranking of web pages, we see how quickly the web can become polluted.

Perhaps we can avoid these obstacles. Perhaps we can solve the technical difficulties of building responsive services for the real world, such as blockchain-based ride-sharing, which is currently slow to develop and difficult for developers to implement. Even if we can, we may not be happy with the results. As Rachel O'Dwyer argues, "Doing so will not automatically achieve the social and labor conditions we desire. It is difficult to actually change how people collaborate and interact with each other."

Because of these concerns, there may be other nontechnical ways to continue to push for decentralization. Humans have always organized in groups — tribes, collectives, federations — at least when they’re making tools. In a paper last year, Trebor Scholz , a professor at the New School in New York, imagined rebuilding Uber through “genuine collaboration — running the technology with different values ​​to benefit everyone involved.” Scholz and his collaborators call this approach “platform collaboration”; by combining improved labor organization with app-based financial technology, they hope to inspire a movement.

Let’s not get carried away, however. At the moment, terms like “platform collaboration” are as vague as “distributed autonomy,” and the likes of La’Zooz and Ujo aren’t going to transform the global economy next week. The mania surrounding blockchain could easily fizzle out. Tim Swanson — head of market research at R3, which is working on blockchain projects with banking giants Goldman Sachs and Barclays — poured cold water on these views. “Essentially, it seems like everyone wants to put everything on the blockchain — whether there are real benefits or not, compared to the costs,” Swanson said. The question, Swanson continued, is “what is the problem that companies or organizations face when solving the double-spend problem? Right now I’d rather say it’s the first production system that’s going to continue to exist in the financial industry.” But the hope of decentralization is eternal. Technology veteran Phil Windley — chairman of XDI.org, which promotes standards for “public architectures for digital identity, security and privacy” — argued that blockchains are indeed complex, but that’s because the problems people want to solve with them are too complex. He recalls the debate over the Internet Protocol in the 1980s, which was complicated if you wanted to connect a lot of computers together. "Compared to the blockchain, it's very simple, but at the time, we had limited processing power, so it looked complicated. Because it's solving a problem that can't be solved any other way: anyone anywhere can communicate with anyone, without a centralized service." Now Windley is excited about using blockchain to build registries. We need a directory for discovering things; now there's a way to "build a directory" for everything without private companies. Companies won't run away. But, he says, like email, their services will be interoperable and you can change providers.

"There's no hidden code, and all organizations have access to this stuff. That's how email works. It's not that we all have to run our own mail servers — it's that we can."

【Original link】：https://medium.com/backchannel/can-an-arcane-crypto-ledger-replace-uber-spotify-and-airbnb-f8ce3846d84a#.fuwcj0pj8
Translated by: Next (8btc.com username)
Bitcoin address: 1Mwmes1CAwgvy5SEpjPAkbnp94BYtsRw66
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/crypto-ledger-replace-uber)