Blockchain Based Ride Sharing System With Rider Privacy — Complete Documentation & Simulation

Overview & System Context

Blockchain Based Ride Sharing System With Rider Privacy: Comprehensive Web-Sourced Technical Investigation Exhaustive Research Dossier · Pure Web-Scraped Content: ~1609 Words · Real Software Screenshots: 3 1. Executive Overview & Technical Background The sharing economy is a socio-economic system whereby consumers share in the creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, and services. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology and the Internet, particularly digital platforms, to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. It can be facilitated by nonprofit organizations, usually based on the concept of book-lending libraries, in which goods and services are provided for free (or sometimes for a modest subscription) or by commercial entities, in which a company provides a service to customers for profit. It relies on the will of the users to share and their ability to overcome the fear of the risks of "stranger danger". It provides benefits, such as lowering the GHG emissions of products by 77%–85%.

2. System Architecture & Core Working Principles There is a conceptual and semantic confusion caused by the many facets of Internet-based sharing leading to discussions regarding the boundaries and the scope of the sharing economy and regarding the definition of the sharing economy. Arun Sundararajan noted in 2016 that he is "unaware of any consensus on a definition of the sharing economy". As of 2015, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 27% of Americans had heard of the term "sharing economy". The term "sharing economy" is often used ambiguously and can imply different characteristics. Survey respondents who had heard of the term had divergent views on what it meant, with many thinking it concerned "sharing" in the traditional sense of the term.

To this end, the terms "sharing economy" and "collaborative consumption" have often been used interchangeably. Collaborative consumption refers to the activities and behaviors that drive the sharing economy, making the two concepts closely interrelated. A definition published in the Journal of Consumer Behavior in 2015 emphasizes these synergies: "Collaborative consumption takes place in organized systems or networks, in which participants conduct sharing activities in the form of renting, lending, trading, bartering, and swapping of goods, services, transportation solutions, space, or money." 3. Software Implementation, Frameworks & Protocols The sharing economy is sometimes understood exclusively as a peer-to-peer phenomenon while at times, it has been framed as a business-to-customer phenomenon. Additionally, the sharing economy can be understood to encompass transactions with a permanent transfer of ownership of a resource, such as a sale, while other times, transactions with a transfer of ownership are considered beyond the boundaries of the sharing economy. One definition of the sharing economy, developed to integrate existing understandings and definitions, based on a systematic review is: "the sharing economy is an IT-facilitated peer-to-peer model for commercial or non-commercial sharing of underutilized goods and service capacity through an intermediary without transfer of ownership"The phenomenon has been defined from a legal perspective as "a for-profit, triangular legal structure where two parties (Providers and Users) enter into binding contracts for the provision of goods (partial transfer of the property bundle of rights) or services (ad hoc or casual services) in exchange for monetary payment through an online platform operated by a third party (Platform Operator) with an active role in the definition and development of the legal conditions upon which the goods and services are provided." Under this definition, the "Sharing Economy" is a triangular legal structure with three different legal actors: "1) a Platform Operator which using technology provides aggregation and interactivity to create a legal environment by setting the terms and conditions for all the actors; (2) a User who consumes the good or service on the terms and conditions set by the Platform Operator; and (3) a Provider who provides a good or service also abiding by the Platform Operator's terms and conditions." While the term "sharing economy" is the term most often used, the sharing economy is also referred to as the access economy, crowd-based capitalism, collaborative economy, community-based economy, gig economy, peer economy, peer-to-peer (P2P) economy, platform economy, renting economy and on-demand economy, though at times some of those terms have been defined as separate if related topics. The notion of "sharing economy" has often been considered an oxymoron, and a misnomer for actual commercial exchanges. Arnould and Rose proposed to replace the misleading term "sharing" with "mutuality". In an article in Harvard Business Review, authors Giana M. Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi argue that "sharing economy" is a misnomer, and that the correct term for this activity is access economy. The authors say, "When 'sharing' is market-mediated—when a company is an intermediary between consumers who don't know each other—it is no longer sharing at all. Rather, consumers are paying to access someone else's goods or services." The article states that companies (such as Uber) that understand this, and whose marketing highlights the financial benefits to participants, are successful, while companies (such as Lyft) whose marketing highlights the social benefits of the service are less successful. According to George Ritzer, this trend towards increased consumer input in commercial exchanges refers to the notion of prosumption, which, as such, is not new. Jemielniak and Przegalinska note that the term sharing economy is often used to discuss aspects of the society that do not predominantly relate to the economy, and propose a broader term collaborative society for such phenomena. The term "platform capitalism" has been proposed by some scholars as more correct than "sharing economy" in discussion of activities of for-profit companies like Uber and Airbnb in the economy sector. Companies that try to focus on fairness and sharing, instead of just profit motive, are much less common, and have been contrastingly described as platform cooperatives (or cooperativist platforms vs capitalist platforms). In turn, projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives. A related dimension is concerned with whether users are focused on non-profit sharing or maximizing their own profit. Sharing is a model that is adapting to the abundance of resources, whereas for-profit platform capitalism is a model that persists in areas where there is still a scarcity of resources. Yochai Benkler, one of the earliest proponents of open source software, who studied the tragedy of the commons, which refers to the idea that when people all act solely in our self-interest, they deplete the shared resources they need for their own quality of life, posited that network technology could mitigate this issue through what he called "commons-based peer production", a concept first articulated in 2002. Benkler then extended that analysis to "shareable goods" in Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production, written in 2004.

4. Practical Deployment, Analysis & Case Studies Geographer Lizzie Richardson describes the sharing economy as a paradox, since it is framed as both capitalist and an alternative to capitalism. A distinction can be made between free sharing, such as genuine sharing, and for-profit sharing, often associated with companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. Commercial co-options of the 'sharing economy' encompass a wide range of structures including mostly for-profit, and, to a lesser extent, co-operative structures.

5. Performance Evaluation & Extended Technical Observations The usage of the term sharing by for-profit companies has been described as "abuse" and "misuse" of the term, or more precisely, its commodification. In commercial applications, the sharing economy can be considered a marketing strategy more than an actual 'sharing economy' ethos; for example, Airbnb has sometimes been described as a platform for individuals to 'share' extra space in their homes, but in some cases, the space is rented, not shared. Airbnb listings additionally are often owned by property management corporations. This has led to a number of legal challenges, with some jurisdictions ruling, for example, that ride sharing through for-profit services like Uber de facto makes the drivers indistinguishable from regular employees of ride sharing companies.

Figure 1: GitHub - AJFatale/Ride-sharing-on-Blockchain Figure 2: pShare: Privacy-Preserving Ride-Sharing System with Minimum-Detouring Route Figure 3: Developing a Ride-Sharing App like Uber with Blockchain Harvested Online Documentation & Reference Sources • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing%20economy