This post is a kick off of the project I am submitting to The Great Byteball Bot War use-a-thon. It has nothing to do with assets or Byteball Market other than I am developing it as a fun side project.

The Carpooling for Byteballers is revolutionizing the ride sharing market by introducing p2p trustless payments for fighting fraud and by adding real identities for safety. Those are somewhat exaggerated statements, but hey, this is crypto! :)

About the project

The main idea is to make the payment for the ride more secure for both the driver and the people sharing the ride. The payments for the ride are captured in a smart contract that unlocks only if they reach the destination. Since the fee for the drive is paid in advance, the driver can be sure that a he or she gets paid as long as they drive to the agreed destination.

This is a simplified version of a ride sharing. The driver posts the pick-up location and destination in advance in a carpooling bulletin board where people can sign up and join the rides. Once they arrive at the pick-up location, they scan the QR code displayed on the driver's mobile screen with their Byteball wallet app to check-in for the ride. As soon as they are ready to leave, the driver closes the check-in period and the smart contract is sent out to the riders who make the payment. The driver gets notified about the incoming payments and when all have paid, the trip starts. When they reach the destination and the driver completes the trip, the GPS coordinates are read and transmitted to the byteball-carpool bot which checks if the people taking the ride are all at the destination. If so, it posts a completed notification to its oracle data feed which unlocks the smart contract and the funds are released to the driver. In case the trip is completed without reaching the destination, a notification indicating the incomplete trip is posted and the smart contract releases the funds back to the passengers.

As a plus, real name attestation could be required from all parties to make the ride share safer. In case of an incident the real identity of the people would be known and handed to the police.

In the course of building this project I will open source many of my ideas and code fragments I used in byteball.market and other Byteball pet projects I never released, hopefully it will be helpful for others too.

Progress report

I jumped in the competition quite late, but I put together some stuff already, so the first week progress is some mock up screens and a working bot that is ready to authenticate users through a website.

Links