Will blockchain put companies like Uber and Airbnb out-of-business?

A lot has been written about how blockchain could have an impact on finance and law. There is another area which could be influenced by the technology behind Bitcoin and that is organisations.

Blockchain can change the way many services work. I want to focus on how it can potentially create decentralised businesses; automated business that run without management and employees.

Before we go on and create a decentralised organisation ourself. Lets have a look at what blockchain already does. One example of a blockchain application is a currency (for example Bitcoin) without a central authority (such as a country, bank or mob family). Bitcoin runs on a network of computers spread around the world. Everyone can have one of the computers executing the code or securing the network, making sure that Bitcoins are generated and transactions are processed.

Think about it… there is no central government behind Bitcoin, it’s not a company, we don’t even know who created Bitcoin and now… it is open to everyone.

There is a lot of (mostly technical) explanation about other applications for blockchain or smart contracts and even about decentralised autonomous organisations (dao’s), but what I want to give you here is a hypothetical real world example of how this technology can be put into work.

Alright… let’s create our organisation!

Even today it is perfectly possible to program a whole organisation into the blockchain, but there will be one big difference with the traditional competitors.

Our organisation will be running without a CEO, employees or offices. Bookings will be done directly between parties without the need of a third person or a company in-between.

To illustrate some of the possibilities we will create an imaginary organisation called Bloxxi (blockchain and taxi). Our organisation will be a direct competitor for, for example, Uber. Bloxxi will help people finding a taxi.

Let’s define some logic. We will need rules that describes how parties contact each other, how reliable they are and payment/reward system, for example:

Taxies can accept a request from a client.

Taxies can have a score or a rating. This makes it easy to use algorithms to decide when a taxi is reliable.

Taxies performance can be tracked.

Clients can order a taxi by using (web) apps interfacing with our application. (Like a cryptocurrency wallet interact with the blockchain).

All taxi trips are being logged.

Bloxxis can create their our own reward unit called bloxxis.

Bloxxis are something like Bitcoin. It is also something we are going to use in the background so in general the users are not going to be aware of its existence.

The clients can pay in their favourite currency and in the background converted to bloxxis.

Bloxxis can be swapped instantly into another currency.

The blockchain magic!

In general most things we have defined above are things we can write in a normal computer program or in a set of programs. Just like existing services and organisations do at the moment. But here comes the blockchain magic. With blockchain we can make it run on a network of computers spread around the world. There isn’t one person who owns the network. Everyone own’s a little piece.

In the case of Bloxxi there will be no authority or a CEO behind it, because we have decided not to include one. There are no traditional servers and Bloxxie has no offices. The taxi owners are getting better payments than from traditional companies, because we can cut out a lot of traditional costs organisations have. This will make it more difficult for a traditional company to compete with a decentralised autonomous business.

Hmmm!?!? And what about customer support and marketing?

We can, for example, put some logic into our program to allocate budget for marketing. Then the community can vote and decide who gets the budget. Customer service can also be done by the community. When someone contributes to the customer support or marketing, they can be automatically rewarded in Bloxxies or another currency. The same voting and rating mechanisms for the taxi as we already have in use. Income will come from each booking. From each booking a small transaction fee will be collected. Also everyone will be able to create websites, apps or maybe even call centers to interact with Bloxxi.

Let’s re-think it a little bit.

We just created a company or a service that’s not officially a company as we know it today. There is no CEO. It operates from day one globally and it’s accessible all over the world. It is highly efficient, because it runs by a computer code. We don’t even know who created it, because the person behind it prefers to stay anonymous, in this case then. It will be difficult to shut it down, because there are no traditional servers to shut down. And it is open to everyone to use it or to contribute to it.

Of course not all processes in the world can be predefined and set into computer code, but there are a lot of cases where blockchain can enable things that were not currently possible. Like our decentralised autonomous company we just created.

There are always people needed to program applications/organisations like Bloxxi.

I hope you enjoyed creating your first decentralised application. And I will be glad to hear your ideas, suggestions or comments.

Additional thoughts. One question I received form an old colleague made me change the word “drivers” into “cars”. Because what will happen if let’s say in the future the cars get completely autonomous and the whole funding process is being done by our application? Who owns the cars? Can it even be possible that the users are at the same time even co-owners of the organisation?

In this case we can allocate budget in our organisation to place orders for new cars and sell old once. The cars will receive request from the blockchain to pick up clients and get a rating or a score. Even parts in our cars can emit messages about the condition and possible repairs. When the score drops below a certain point it means the car has to be replaced.

—

kiril nachev

www.buro.one