With bitcoin becoming a $6bn industry, and OpenBazaar development doing well, we now have an almost entire ecosystem in place, all that's left's the delivery system that could scale up against legacy systems like USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. Not to say that the existing system doesnt work, but there are those that would benefit from participating in the shipping business, add that to the efficiency of decentralized systems, there is no reason for us to not make a similar implementation for shipping physical systems.
What I'm thinking of is a fleet of volunteer bike couriers who get paid in bitcoins that get released out of escrow after delivery confirmation. Longer distances would then need several stops, each courier dead dropping the package in a mail station operated by another member, to be forwarded to the next station, etc. (All of that assuming the item is a small-medium parcel not weighing more than a few pounds.)
I know that doesn't sound like a well thought out solution, and it's not exactly a white paper, I just wanted to see what solutions other people have made to address this. If there's already an existing discussion about this, please feel free to leave a link as a reply.
Related links:
Shyp.comA reddit thread about this same topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1haxrp/decentralized_anonymous_parcel_delivery_service/Anonymous Physical Object Delivery:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~elli/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf
