區塊鏈 (blockchain) 在車子共享的應用

Ben Schiller, How The Blockchain Could Usher In A Future Of Shared Mobility, Fast Company, 2017/6/20.

 Turo is a peer-to-peer car rental marketplace that currently lists about 150,000 vehicles. The way it works is simple. As a consumer, I don’t need to go to Avis or Budget to rent a car—I can rent my neighbor’s vehicle for cheaper. And as an owner, I can make money to pay off a car’s cost just by agreeing to share it. Turo (formerly known as RelayRides) estimates that renting out a new Honda Civic for 14.5 days a month earns enough to pay off a standard car loan over 72 months. Turo thus claims to be “changing the economics of car ownership....

“Blockchains have the potential to reduce the transaction and trust costs that prevent car owners from monetizing their vehicles and driving data,” says Chris Ballinger, director of mobility services at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in an interview. “The ability to monetize their car could potentially provide greater financial security and better options to car owners facing financial difficulty or in need of extra cash.”... 

To find out about how shared mobility, like peer-to-peer car rentals and hailing, could move to blockchains I sat down with the team from Oaken Innovations. Oaken is an early-stage startup that’s part of the TRI group. It’s working on ways of fusing the internet of things–that is, networks of machines–with blockchain systems. They have a prototype for car sharing where Raspberry Pi devices (representing cars) have their own identity on a blockchain and where vehicles and people interact autonomously. The system is coded on the Ethereum computing platform, which is similar to the bitcoin blockchain but has better processing ability for large volumes of transactions and incorporates “smart contracts”–protocols that authenticate identity and enforce pre-negotiated contractual terms. 

In the case of car sharing, a smart contract might verify that you actually own the car, state that you’re willing to share it with people with reputation scores of, say, 90% and above, and that the car is available on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Someone wanting a car would need to meet this criteria, then the protocols would unlock the doors for rental, and allow you to start the engine. The contract would also facilitate payment, perhaps using a dedicated currency for the purpose. That would allow participants to avoid financial transaction fees that come with using normal money–for instance, the fees we pay to Mastercard and Visa for more or less everything... 

The car blockchain could also facilitate new types of insurance. At the moment, the amount we pay for coverage is dictated largely by the cost of insuring a large pool of people, from the 16-year-olds on the road for the first time to the 70-year-olds who’ve been driving their whole lives. Though we might pay more if we made lots of claims, the premium isn’t particularly personalized and it doesn’t change whether we use the car one hour a week or every hour. The blockchain could enable usage-based insurance where the amount we pay is based on how much we drive and how well we drive (according to sensors in the car). It could also run off the blockchain’s reputation system, where premiums are calculated based on our social capital as much as actuarial tables. In other words, if you drive well, don’t drive too much, and people like you, you may pay less than now.