Oddbean

My wife Karin was complaining to me about how much Airbnb charges guests booking our accommodation. A $75 apartment charge and $50 cleaning fee becomes a $200 total charge once Airbnb adds their frankly extortionate $75 booking fee. I told her Uber takes over 80% from each fare booked via the Uber app, leaving the poor Uber drivers with less than 20% of which they need to pay for fuel and associated vehicle costs, leaving them with fuck all. Then I started thinking about Amazon which has been described as a private fiefdom, levying large fees upon their merchants and cancelling any items and or merchants they do not approve of. I started wondering if apps similar to Airbnb, Uber or Amazon could be built on Nostr? I don’t know if it’s possible to build an app similar to Airbnb or Uber, but if any developers could do it, I’m sure the mighty and enlightened Nostr could. An Amazon equivalent marketplace can’t be too hard. We’ve already got the payments platform sorted. It would be appropriate devs should apply a fair V4V royalty for their efforts, but nothing like the rapacious fees charged by these obscene corporations. Few things would give me greater satisfaction than seeing these parasitic rent-seeking corporations market share ebb away to nothing. I’m sure I’m not alone in this sentiment. Any takers, devs?

Not a dev but I had a similar thought last night, imagining streaming sats to a driver while I’m taken to my destination much in the same way as, say, @fountain_app streams sats to podcasters for content. An idea whose time has come?

Interestingly this has labour law implications, particularly relevant since our Court of Appeal decided to insert their progressive agenda into Uber’s relationship with its drivers… https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/08/26/uber-loses-appeal-against-ruling-drivers-are-employees/

Have you seen any presentations about Nostrocket? I think that has much promise in general and specifically for the decentralised Nostr based equivalents of Airbnb, Uber and Amazon we were talking about. Here’s G Sovereignty talking about Nostrocket at Nostrasia. He also presented about it in Riga recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkMCMOUhnrA

Here’s the Riga pres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddvHagjmRJY My only problem with contributing to Nostrocket is a current complete inability to code. 🤷🏼‍♂️ Lucky there are plenty of talented devs working on Nostr.

Hi. I feel that these will come as adoption grows but in the meantime there is a bitcoin-centric ‘Airbnb’ company already called AirBTC. I don’t know anything about them apart from what I saw on their website but might be worth checking out. https://airbtc.online/