But owning a smartphone with a touch screen (instead of tin cans connected by a string) and having the luxury of choosing between Uber vs LibreTaxi (instead of waving your arms on the street to hail a taxi) is also a 1st world problem. If we're discussing percentage of world market, 51%+ do not have combined attributes of (1) smartphone ownership[1] + (2) Uber availability + (3) preference for paying cash.

For customers, one of the key attractions to Uber is that drivers can't play the game of "oh sorry my credit card reader is broken, you'll have to pay cash". In other words, many customers deliberately choose Uber as way of not having to pay cash. (This point is more relevant in Uber-USA and not Uber-India that allows cash payment.)

The developer name I see on the LibreTaxi page is "Roman Pushkin, San Francisco, California" and since he's based in a 1st-world location, it seems like the Uber-vs-LibreTaxi has relevance to cashless people like me. If he intends for the service to be used mostly by 3rd-world countries where cash is king, I misunderstood the point of the Uber vs LibreTaxi comparison.

EDIT ADD 40-minutes later: I found author's comment on the intended market of customers: "Just started http://libretaxi.org - uber alternative for communities and remote regions." : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328052

also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13530355: "Uber, a company evaluated at $60B, will unlikely go to remote Siberian region where I was born."

Conclusion: LibreTaxi isn't really a competitor to Uber -- it's more of an alternative to remote villages having no ride sharing at all and therefore cash payments makes perfect sense for that market.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone...

Since that article prices for smartphones have tumbled again. I bought a smartphone, quadcore, 4GB, built in TV, Built in radio for P1,700 (about $34) Its a cheap phone, but it works fine. http://ph.priceprice.com/MyPhone-my81-DTV-17896/

In Vietnam it's the norm to have a smartphone but it's seriously difficult to get hold of a normal debit/credit card.

I've been in Qatar for business. Coming from the US, it is shocking. Some systems have leapfrogged -- e.g., ease of banking, 2FA, mobile phone plans, messaging, ride-hailing apps, etc.

Other systems lag -- the most egregious example being the lack of a national address system. Correct -- i have no home address. Half the country does not -- people send GPS coordinates and WhatsApp location pindrops for ride-hailing and food delivery.

s/cash/peer-to-peer/

I'm curious how this is possible or if you're exaggerating. I live in London, so a pretty well connected city, and although I can use card/contactless almost everywhere I still need cash about once a week as some small places won't accept card. 10 years ago I'm sure cash was much more necessary.

That bank interaction is obviously too cumbersome to withdraw $80+ every week to pay cash for taxis. If all taxis refused to take credit card then yes, I'd have to use the ATM on a regular basis.

You're right that cashless was only possible recently. Even though credit-cards had been around for 50+ years, most people couldn't go 100% cashless because many places like McDonald's fast food only took cash. Those restaurants avoided credit transactions because having customers wait for the charge receipt and then sign their name clogged up the queue with impatient people. However, a recent revolution in payment processing allowed "no signature" transactions for small amounts under a threshold (say $20). The "no signature" includes not having to electronically sign the touch pad -- it isn't just avoiding paper and pen. With that change, McDonald's started accepting credit cards in 2002. People also might notice that when they pay by credit card at Starbucks, they don't have to sign anything. Credit transactions are now so fast, the situation is reversed: cashiers take longer to count out exact change for cash transactions than let customers pay by credit card!

The "no sign" revolution helped make lots of the "cash only" places disappear so now it's very easy to be credit-card only.

That certainly depends on the country. Good luck living cashless in Europe, especially in Germany where virtually no small store, food vendor etc. has a CC reader.

In Scandinavia you can pay with credit card almost everywhere, starting from a food truck at a festival. They'll have a tablet and a credit card reader connected. Some places don't take cash at all.

[0] https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication... [PDF]

A breakdown by age group is on page 33. Unsurprisingly, young people pay by card more often than older people.

Various other figure breaking down card/cash usage along different lines are on the subsequent pages. Poorer people use cash for a larger percentage of their transactions than richer people.

Page 63 breaks down usage by occasion/purpose of payment (gas/restaurant/retail/...).

Lastly, 97% of Germans have a girocard (debit card), but only 1 in 3 have a credit card.

Singapore, Netherlands, France and Sweden are way ahead (~60%). I'm a bit surprised that the US is only 45% cashless.

And relevant to the actual topic: Even in big cities like Hamburg or Berlin it is not guaranteed that you can pay by card in a taxi. So I ask every time I enter one whether they accept credit cards or not. I would say 80% of my cab rides are paid in cash.

In other European countries things look different: On the other extreme is Sweden which I visit regularly. I couldn't even tell you how their cash looks like because I haven't used any for a long time.

I don't have to worry about securing local currency before I can get around -- it just uses my card (which doesn't charge a fee to convert).

I don't have to worry about not being able to explain where I'm trying to go across language barriers or various levels of familiarity with a locale -- the built-in map app works the same way in Paris, London, Prague as it does in San Francisco or Durham. The GPS features keep drivers honest as to routes and adds a (small) sense of security as you know your journey is being tracked in case something goes sideways.

All that said, LibreTaxi looks really promising & I really like the premise behind it. Maybe, some day, I'll not want the tracking features, for example. I hope it takes off!

https://byteball.org/

The situation in most Asian countries is a bit different from markets like the US or Australia. Here in Australia, I use cash maybe once every two weeks, it's very rare for me to have more than $30-40 in my wallet - I often have no cash at all.

I suspect the real reason here is that credit cards aren't anonymous and are contrary to the ethos of the author here.