City. David drove for Uber for a couple of months in late 2015 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the city council had passed an ordinance essentially banning services like Uber. David continued to drive despite the ordinance and subsequently found himself in some legal trouble after some instances with the local police department, earning him the title 'illegal Uber driver'. He commenced an activist campaign called 'Free Uber' in an attempt to change the ordinance. He met a lot of other Uber drivers and discovered that almost all of them were more dissatisfied with how they'd been treated by Uber than with the ordinance itself.
It then struck David that perhaps he'd been granted an opportunity to do better than Uber by organizing and developing a decentralized ride service. The service began with the group offering free rides on New Year's Eve in circumvention of the local ordinance while the software and the code was developed. This garnered David and his group a load of media attention and catapulted them into the spotlight where they began to devise a way to actually compete with Uber.
A website was built and put out the call for 100 or more drivers to join the movement before the service's launch which is scheduled for Valentine's Day on February 14, 2016. Over 1600 drivers have signed up to participate in the launch which will service the area surrounding Portsmouth.
The app and service is called Arcade City and upon launch will accept payments via Stripe, a service which processes both fiat and Bitcoin payments. The long term vision for Arcade City is to integrate its app and service with the Ethereum blockchain.
The problems with Uber that Arcade City seeks to solve are largely problems of centralization. Uber was the target of criticism when they cut service rates in several cities overnight without warning, leaving many drivers with up to 40% less income than they'd been earning and depending upon.
Arcade City hopes to implement a solution where service rates are determined between the driver and the customer with two different payment modes. Peer-to-peer payment mode allows the customer and the driver to communicate directly and determine both ride details and an acceptable form of payment - whether it be cash, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, silver, or any other store of value. This mode does not require that payment take place through the app which does not take a fee. The other payment mode requires that payment be done through the app which takes just a 10% fee.
After its launch in February, Arcade City will continue to refine its app and its service to implement and tweak features such that its peer-to-peer and decentralized nature is enhanced. For more information or to get involved, you may wish to visit Arcade City on Facebook. Look for Arcade City to soon be disrupting Uber in a city near you.
BitNation
BitNation is an organization and blockchain-based project which began in 2014 and aims to provide tools people can use to build their own nation states complete with various
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