Monero, Airbnb, Uber, Open Bazaar, free services, charitable donations and plausible deniability

How much will the ‘sharing economy’ change if a crypto currency would introduce plausible deniability in financial transactions?

Suppose you have found a nice bed and breakfast at a beautiful location and would like to stay there for a week. You go through the reservation procedure. Everything works like a normal checkout service, but instead of doing a payment to the account of the bed and breakfast, you get a friendly suggestion to make a charitable donation to a seemingly random Monero address (or other privacy centric crypto currency). You do the donation to the Monero address and after a couple of minutes you receive a message that the reservation is complete.

For newcomers the Monero donation part might be a bit strange at first, but if you get the service or product that you requested then everything is working fine.

Monero transactions, charitable donations and plausible deniability

Monero has an opaque blockchain. The sender, receiver and amounts are all private. This means that it is not possible or at least extremely hard to establish links between Monero transactions. This is true for all observers of the Monero blockchain, including the individuals who do the Monero transactions. The sender and receiver cannot check the contents of each others wallets. This provides plausible deniability for producers and consumers with regards to financial transactions.

A consumer that donates to a particular Monero address, does not know if that address is actually associated with a producer. And neither will a producer know if a financial transaction originates from a consumer.

The producer will also have plausible deniability. The donation address might actually not have anything to do with the producer. It might be an address of the favorite charity of a producer. But even if the address is controlled by the producer, then this information does not need to be disclosed to anyone else. A producer can choose or claim to provide a service or product to someone for free.

This might have some interesting consequences.

Airbnb, Uber, Open Bazaar and censorship resistance

Anyone can use the steps described above in real life and online. But it would be really interesting to implement this on a large scale for online platforms like Airbnb, Uber and other ‘sharing economy’ services.

In the short term this idea could have a big impact on the sharing economy before it spreads to other areas of the economy. It would be interesting if services like Airbnb and Uber would be able to introduce parts of this idea. But the way that Airbnb and Uber are setup might actually hinder them from implementing it. They act as middleman and take a fee. This breaks (most of) the plausible deniability aspect. Accounting, financial and legal practices could further inhibit them from doing this. But who knows, maybe they’ll find a way to make it work. But even if they don’t, others might and this can give them a distinct advantage.

A decentralized, censorship resistant market like Open Bazaar might be better suited for this idea. Anyone can setup an online shop on Open Bazaar and provide products and services. You can do all this for free and without third parties.

So why not put up bed and breakfast and transportation services on Open Bazaar? If Open Bazaar would make it as simple and fast as Airbnb or Uber to provide these services, then it can become an interesting alternative.

Perhaps Open Bazaar can introduce a plugin or ‘App’ architecture to allow people to develop and experiment with these kinds of services on top of the existing infrastructure. This could attract Airbnb, Uber or similar businesses to provide services via Open Bazaar.

These are just some thoughts on what is possible. This is no (legal) advise.

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