Cutting out the Middleperson with Blockchain
In many business transactions as diverse as trading stocks or ordering a ride on Uber, there are unnecessary (middle-person) fees that the user must pay. Take Uber for example. If I order a ride from Joe, there should only be two parties involved: me and Joe. When I order from the app, there are three people involved, me, Joe, and Uber. Since Uber reasons that they helped organize me and Joe, they should get a cut of Joe’s pay.
Thanks to blockchain these fees are being threatened. Imagine having a decentralized network of users and drivers. While users and drivers would still technically need to use an app/platform to access the marketplace, the overall fee structure would give users much more freedom. Drivers would be free to set their own rates, consumers would be able to set their willingness to pay. The app would not decide fees, its users, drivers, and the laws of economics would.
If the decentralized app (commonly called a dApp) is set up in a way where users also transmit server data using a peer to peer connection, there wouldn’t even need to be a centralized node/server. The server could be directly run from a user’s phone to a driver’s phone, which would save costs even more compared to an app like Uber, that would carry the charge of server costs in either raising consumer prices, or reducing driver salary.
Decentralized ride sharing is just one potential application of blockchain. Removing the centralized party from a network and establish a true peer to peer direct node connection is really exciting. Already interesting and efficient improvements over existing, centralized, applications are being seen in areas as diverse as identity verification and decentralized file storage.
Sources:
http://pressroom.toyota.com/releases/toyota+research+institute+explores+blockchain+technology.htm
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-promise-of-blockchain-is-a-world-without-middlemen
https://coincenter.org/entry/why-is-decentralized-and-distributed-file-storage-critical-for-a-better-web