Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
I don&#x27;t understand the transit example presented in this article. I feel like I am missing something fundamental about the utility of any of these distributed services backed by their own type of coin.<p>For the transit example you have some people who want to request rides, and some people who want to provide rides. OK. Someone develops an application to process these requests, in some kind of bidding system...<p>How are the rider and driver matched up? I assume there needs to be some publicly accessible list of all open queries. Is that list what would be stored on the TransitCoin blockchain, and would that imply that all records of requested and completed rides are public, such that someone who knows your TransitCoin address can read all your previous trips, which are stored in this immutable chain until the end of time?<p>Would the TransitCoins be &#x27;mined&#x27; by people running a &#x27;node&#x27; that does the ride matching? Then in order to pay for a ride you send a TransitCoin to the driver? The driver would then have to sell his earned TransitCoins on an exchange for USD (or GroceryCoins) at the end of the day?<p>In the end I don&#x27;t see why a new currency needs to be included in every proposed use of a blockchain, if the people who want to participate as a consumer and as a service provider are the ones running the nodes of the blockchain.