Decentralised on ERC20 would work nicely. Can't recommend it otherwise. Could be interesting use case if the existing penny auction sites decide to go this route but it's highly doubtful as that would expose their fraudulent activity.

This might be the opportunity to slot into this niche.

Ride My Car New Year Update

Greetings Riders

It has been a full year since the conception of Ride My Car, and we are very honoured to have had great support from our little community who have helped us get as far as we have today.

2017 is a new year, and the team at Ride My Car are excited to work on bringing further developments to the blockchain ridesharing space.

We're very happy that the site is seeing use from our early community members. Although we have yet to be listed on an exchange, there has been a healthy amount of users earning their Ride tokens through the site. Hopefully in the near term we'll be listed by some exchanges to allow for the trading of the tokens.

As for our next update:

The RIDE chain builds value through acting both as escrow, and at the same time a decentralised database containing vital ride meta data. The activity of each user, including their rides offered, rides taken, geo-locations, funds spent/earned, and reputation / ratings are to be stored on the chain and imprinted via OP_RETURN script code to the RIDE chain.

This process means that we are solving several real life problems.

1. Decentralised Authentication

Storing any kind of ride activity and user accumulated reputation, funds, and even account data on the chain means that there is no central attack vector. Suppose a hacker was able to breach our front end, then the hacker would still not be able to access everyone's account. In terms of security, this transfers the responsibility for security from the service provider (us) to the users (you).

This is the kind of tradeoff means that attacks are compartmentalized to individual users and the platform as a whole remains better secured.

2. Incorruptible Audit Trail

One of the most important aspects of securing RIDE metadata on chain, is the ability mathematically scrutinize the actions taken by the users which themselves serve two main purposes:
   a) Record the users atomic actions for proof of activity
   b) No one can impersonate you, your account, or your car.
With this audit trail in place, the public record will contain timestamped block headers for the ride ledger meaning that it becomes increasingly difficult for someone to tamper with the database or manipulate your account data.

3. RIDE value chain

The use of OP_RETURN for creating this audit trail of user activity on completion of a ride means that every single completed ride can not only be tracked on chain, and therefore could be interrogated by any 3rd party application, it also provides an inbuilt protocol for reducing the supply of the coins. This is a welcome by-product of OP_RETURN outputs being provably unspendable.


We also plan to integrate other currencies, however the RIDE chain will always be the chain that the raw meta data will be stored on. As such, a small part of each completed ride will contribute in the creation of this OP_RETURN output corresponding to that instance of a ride, and some RIDE tokens will be burnt / made provably unspendable to secure that part of the audit trail.

This as an economic protocol creates a reducing supply of liquid RIDE tokens which the burn rate will increase linearly as more users complete journey's on the platform.

Platform aside, we have begun works on a promotional video to be made that will highlight the advantages of our platform and the goal is for the video to firstly introduce users to crypto-currency, then onboard them to the ride platform with as little friction as possible.

That's all for now folks

Hope everyone had a happy new year and you're ready for more riding in 2017!

Ridesharing on a blockchain is going to set the precedent for how ridesharing will work in the future. Decentralisation begins with the ride meta data being written to the chain as part of every ride. So, a trustless rideshare market is what separates us from the '100's of ridesharing apps'.
An important aspect to remember is that the ride meta data allows for the total autonomy of ride 'transaction's to take place. The chain itself not only serves the purpose of being the currency being transacted, but also as the transport layer for all ride meta data regardless of which is transacted. The more rides, the more reviews, the more ratings, the stronger the value of the network.

We have built the system with the intention of expanding transaction options whilst leveraging the ride chain for all the important ride meta data as well user reputation. This means, whether you purchase a ride with bitcoin or any other currency, fiat included, the ride chain acts as the intermediate broker of these rides.

Update

Greetings everybody, as you know the client we had on release had several issues which we have gone through a lot of trouble to fix. Initially the network was unable to go fully into Proof of Stake and with our last update, this was fixed.

We then had issues with users who reported orphaned stake rewards as well as clients crashing. This has also now been fixed in our latest update to the code.

Please make sure you update your client to the latest version 1.2.1.0

Links provided below.


LINUX

LINUX

WINDOWS

WINDOWS

SOURCE

https://github.com/RideMyCar/RideMyCar-Coin

If you have any other issues, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Now that the coin is smoothly running, our attention is now to getting the beta platform out. More details will follow shortly.

I have been working closely with some coin development specialists in diagnosing the issue with staking which seems systemic as multiple users have reported the crash issue.

We do have a build that is stable under our test bench and we'll be looking to roll this out as soon as possible once we're sure the issue is resolved.

Pending that, we'll look at the steps to getting the test platform rolled out.

Thanks for the patience.

We are aware of the staking issue and we're working on a fix to resolve these issues.

Please bear with us, this is our top priority for now.

Thanks again to all participants, I see now that you have all withdrawn your coins. In the coming day or so, the Proof of Stake will come online and of course with that we'll be following up with some more updates on the beta platform as well as looking at getting listed on some exchanges. It would be great if during this time as many of you as possible kept your wallets open to help the transition to proof of stake as smooth as possible.

Once again, if you have any issues, do not hesitate to contact me.

Update

Thank you to all participants in our crowdsale. There was a lot of really good discussion leading up to our crowdsale and notable interest for this project.

For all Crowdsale participants, please proceed to login to your accounts where you will be able to download the desktop wallet and proceed to withdraw your coins to your own wallet.

If you have issues with withdrawal please contact me directly and i'll help you get your coins.

Moving forward, we've prepared a document which covers our marketing strategy and we'll soon be releasing the first beta site for users to start ride sharing!

Once again, thank you to all participants who have made Ride My Car possible, to those who missed the crowdsale but are interested in getting some RMC, you can start become early users of the platform or go ahead and purchase some on exchanges.

Marketing Brochure: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxE1vuFBSZ8YbFJDVGdZYXdNcTA/view?usp=sharing
www.ridemycar.org

The expenditure being an issue is noted, I have prepared a doc to outline the steps that we will take to begin building our user base. Of course, constructive criticism always welcome. Again thanks for the continued discussion and support.

Following an earlier suggestion, we would like to explore a designated driver market which would actually function like Uber does, except for people who will drive you and your car home in DUI scenarios.

Thanks to the participants in the Crowdsale thus far, remember, it ends on Friday 8th Oct, so don't leave it to the last minute to buy!

Crowdsale Live

Just a reminder that the crowdsale is now live at www.ridemycar.me

For those who registered already, you will now be able to start making deposits and participating in the crowdsale.

The crowdsale will end on Friday 8th Oct.

As always, thank you for the continued support for RMC, without you, this project would not see the light of day.

Crowdfund Announcement

Ride My Car was conceptualised at the end of 2015, our goal was to take on the task of building a car pooling ride share platform and see how far we can take this idea forward integrating crypto technology.
Undoubtedly, much of the discussion thus far has focused on comparing existing services and analysing their business models. One of the outcomes from discussion was that it would be difficult to have a good penetration of a niche market with strong existing incumbent competitors, furthermore, the capital required to incentivise a wider user base would be enormous.

Before embarking on any sort of crowd funding, we felt it was important that we should at-least produce a beta working platform to serve as the minimum viable product going forward. In doing so, we begin an iterative process of building on our product whilst giving early adopters the opportunity to use a functional platform.

We've decided to go the route of an uncapped crowd fund to allow price discovery to happen from the get go. What this means, is participants will be distributed coins based on their percentage contribution to the total amount raised during the crowd sale.

To make this process easier, we've developed our bespoke crowd sale page where you'll be able to participate.

To participate, register an account at www.ridemycar.me
You will be able to see the estimated number of coins you will receive, although this will no doubt be subject to change as more people participate.
Once the crowd sale is over, your coins will be available for withdraw directly from the crowd sale site. Desktop wallet links are of course included.

The crowdsale itself will go live from Monday the 3rd of October, and finish at the end of the Week on midnight Friday 8th.

Once again, thank you all for the continued support and discussion contribution.

To read our Crowd sale terms and conditions, please visit www.ridemycar.org/terms

Thanks for the interesting discussion, it's been really insightful seeing what people are interested in.

I have made notes of all your suggestions and I'll make sure that I give each a thorough think through.

One of the more heated debates I see is regarding how we deal with verifying users.

This is obviously something that I recognise as being important in building a user base that trusts at the very least, the identify of the people they will be interacting with. We will be implementing a system after the beta that will require a minimum amount of verification with government id. We will not however be making this id public. Drivers will also need to submit some vehicle information so as to tie their car to their name. Again, this information will not be public and is there to safeguard against people using stolen vehicles. (As well as allow easier identification of vehicles for passengers waiting for their ride)

Obviously there are some challenges in users building some trust, and that is why we've made sure to build in a trust rating system much like uber's which will allow you to leave feedback as well as rate the overall experience. Of course, early users will have an opportunity to build trust.

Each account will also build reputation, regardless of whether you are a driver or a passenger. Accounts will eventually have most of the public meta data available for interrogation on the chain. And we will implement an attestation system to allow users to do their own background checks.

As for the rental market, it is an interesting proposition but something I haven't begun to look into yet. For now, getting the minimum viable product out for beta, and then looking for some form of crowdfunding will be the focus areas.

As cryptor0th has mentioned, it will be difficult to directly challenge other ride sharing platforms. They have had multiple funding rounds that have given them the ability to sustain astronomically high burn rates just to win a market share. We don't plan to be a loss leader so there won't be aggressive subsidies, and the likelihood of getting substantial funding is also quite slim. However, the project, like most other crypto projects, serves as an experiment to see if we can actually make serious use case work, even if at the prototype level and then serve as a benchmark for potential integration into the mainstream products.

On a final note, just because i'm not replying to each of the comments, it doesn't mean i'm not reading them all, and I do appreciate all of the feedback on the core idea so far.

Thanks for the analysis cryptor0th.

From the discussion in the thread, it seems that it will indeed be quite a challenge to get a meaningful amount of adoption without burning a lot of cash whilst trying to become a loss leader.
Some of the possible solutions to this have been to narrow the demographic and target specific use cases, I think someone mentioned University students for example.

I would like to mention however that the purpose of this pre-ann is to have this discussion and see how the direction I should take this project. Integrating crypto into a real life business model is never easy because as you say, it requires changing the behaviour of users who are already accustomed to other systems. In addition, the crypto demographic is already a very small subset of society as a whole and trying to get people to understand and use crypto is a challenge in itself.

I will say that the project much like crypto in general is still an experiment and I cannot guarantee that it will reach mainstream user adoption, but the lessons learnt will enable some aspects of crypto to be applied to this business model which I think is worth the effort. There are so many possibilities and yet one of the bottlenecks will always be the funding to make them possible.

I will put together a marketing plan after reading some more discussion and I will be happy to discuss ideas moving forward.

At this moment, I'm putting more focus on putting together a minimum viable product, after which, there is a possibility of approaching larger investors for the funding required to take this to the next level. I suspect that the larger part money spent will be in acquiring users, and you are very right in saying that this could be of the order of a few million dollars. There are however initiatives from governments around the world seeking to fund projects with some potential value. http://www.coindesk.com/uk-government-distributed-ledger-competition/ this is one I saw just the other day.

Sorry if I wasn't clear in my previous post. The project is on-going and we're nearing the stage where we can start getting the coin moving. I'm sure you can understand that it was important for us to build a minimum viable product before actually moving forward with form of coin distribution.

Ride My Car Marketing Site

Lots of work has been done in the last few weeks and we're getting to a point where we can nearly launch a minimum viable product.

In the mean time we've put together a simple website which we will be adding to and making further updates to as well.

You can visit that at www.ridemycar.org

In the next few days we'll have some screenshots of the site and what will be available as beta, and a road map for what we'll be working on as the project continues.

We'll also have a crowd fund that will help us take us to the next level.  More details on that to follow.

We've actually made some progress.

1. We've designed the activity flow for booking process.
2. Developed the coin to allow ride meta data to be stored on the blockchain
3. The site itself has largely been been built but we're still refining the design.
4. We're still looking at ways to build in the rating system

To actually get this system used in the real world, we're also looking at various options to market the site once live.
We're thinking banner ads at various crypto related websites such as bitcoin.com / cointelegraph.com / newsbtc.com as well as video advertising at youtube with a custom video made to show what we're about and how to get started.

We do have a landing page nearly ready that will be useful for people not following the thread and shortly we should be in the position to launch the coin.

Sorry for the lack of information recently but things will pick up real soon！

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Thanks for your early vote of confidence, the journey (no pun intended) is still long and winding so it is truly early days yet.

As mentioned in an earlier post, taking on Uber and similar existing services will of course be difficult since they have had funding rounds and large teams to work on their product for a very long time. However, one aspect that we have chosen to approach that differs from them is the concept of working with journey meta data on the chain.

As we approach the full announcement, I will of course share my personal background.
Funding is something that i've spent some time thinking about as I feel that traditional crypto methods of raising funds have not really served any real meaning in terms of actually pushing the project further. It's almost always been about giving the devs and early an investors a pay day. This isn't something that I believe will push the project further or give the project some long-term stake-holders.