Description
Trust is the lubricant of the sharing economy, especially in peer-to-peer carsharing where you leave a valuable good to a stranger in the hope of getting it back unscathed. Central mechanisms for handling this information gap nowadays are ratings and reviews of other users. The rising of connected car technology opens new possibilities to increase trust by collecting and providing e.g. driving behavior data. At the same time, this means an intrusion into the privacy of the user. Therefore, in this work we explore technological approaches that allow building trust without violating the privacy of individuals. We evaluate to what extent blockchain technology and smart contracts are suitable technologies to meet these challenges by setting up a prototype implementation of a blockchain-based carsharing approach. In this context, we present our research approach and evaluate the prototype in terms of trust and privacy.
Using Blockchain in Peer-to-Peer Carsharing to Build Trust in the Sharing Economy
Trust is the lubricant of the sharing economy, especially in peer-to-peer carsharing where you leave a valuable good to a stranger in the hope of getting it back unscathed. Central mechanisms for handling this information gap nowadays are ratings and reviews of other users. The rising of connected car technology opens new possibilities to increase trust by collecting and providing e.g. driving behavior data. At the same time, this means an intrusion into the privacy of the user. Therefore, in this work we explore technological approaches that allow building trust without violating the privacy of individuals. We evaluate to what extent blockchain technology and smart contracts are suitable technologies to meet these challenges by setting up a prototype implementation of a blockchain-based carsharing approach. In this context, we present our research approach and evaluate the prototype in terms of trust and privacy.