Personally, I love the idea of flying, autonomous delivery services as much as the next guy, but I think this conversation needs some re-alignment. The issue more presently at hand is that of a lack of decentralized distribution services. I had an idea for such a system.
BitDrop.
Bitdrop would be a system for human "runners" to pass goods from person to person in the most cryptographically secure way possible.
Person A negotiates a sale of an item to person B online.
Upon deciding on BitDrop as means of distribution, distance would be calculated and current gas prices would be tabulated. This is the base shipping cost.
Person A types in their "willing to travel" radius, and, the machine would chew on the data and randomly/securely spit back out an exact lat-lon point within that radius.
A nearby runner gets notified that a package is ready for distribution. He's signed up with his own "willing to travel" radius as well. Ideally, if there are enough warm bodies in the chain, the venn diagrams all start overlapping, and form a human supply chain.
Upon the completed transaction, all runners in the chain would receive good feedback (ideas for delivery confirmation? sms? scanned qr codes?), and get higher GPG rankings, which would enable them to deliver goods that had been marked with higher trust requirements...and likewise, the more you're trusted in in the chain, the more the runners can charge. Seller wants to sell something of importance/high value? they can raise the trust threshold (and subsequently, the shipping rate)
As far as black market goods go, I've thought of this scenario. The TOS for bitdrop would state specifically that transfer of illegal goods is strictly prohibited; however, you may anonymously mark your package "shaded" if you feel the contents pose risk for any member of the chain, including senders, receivers and most importantly, runners. Shaded goods may be distributed exclusively via dead drops, and runners can opt into notifications of shaded packages, but only after a GPG trust threshold is passed, so a significant time expenditure is required before you go "googling for drugs". You basically knowingly waive your rights when you deal with shaded transacations. That being said, I'm sure it would turn into a profitable venture for risk-takers, while keeping clean runners away from things that could land them in jail for trafficking.
There are other details I've thought of, including the distinction between dead drops and trusted drops. Dead drops would be entry-points into the runner market. Let's say I want to make some extra money, and I want to sign up as a runner. I go to the bitdrop site and sign up for an entry-level position. This requires that I pledge a deposit for the first item I'll deliver. This means that new runners will mainly focus on delivering items of little value. It's a Low-risk, low-return scenario for everybody involved with the transaction. Once I, the runner, complete my transaction, the deposit is returned to my account, as well as the base shipping cost + small delivery fee. Part of becoming a runner is setting up GPG-Authentication. The buyer and seller then add ratings to my transaction, and after a threshold is reached, I'm allowed to forego placing a deposit on items of certain values or lower. Eventually, dead drops would give way of chains with "trusted drops", where people who've established their trust arrange meetups based on encrypted lat-lon values and anonymous instructions. The specifics should be debated about at length to promote the safety and longevity of the chain
I don't expect my first ramblings to be the end-all-be-all of this system, but unless I'm way off base, I think the concept has potential. I actually wrote up an extensive post detailing this idea yesterday, and stupidly hit f5 before I sent it, erasing my whole post instantly... I'd love to hear feedback and concerns.
