In rural communities here in Chile, and also in smaller towns, there is an amazing solution to this called Collectivo. I had never heard of it before arriving, but man it's the greatest thing. It's something in-between a bus and a taxi: a taxi with a predefined route. So if you're on a route, which there are many, you flag down a collectivo as it passes, and since both you and the driver already know where it's going, it'll stop for you even if there are already people in the car.

What makes this amazing is that it's cheap because the route is pre-set, and it's shared, and the driver can just go all day knowing there will be people along the route, and doesn't have to finish one ride before starting another. But meanwhile they'll generally go partially off their route if you request it, and it's not too much of a bother.

Why don't North American rural areas do this? It's a really great way to get around, and makes it so you can live (or at least visit) in rural areas without owning a car.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

Pre-set routes seem distinctly worse. By definition they don't flex to handle new / temporary traffic patterns. Though they do have a super-huge benefit of not needing an app / real-time requests - in some cases that's a requirement.

Americans own cars because it's convenient to do many different things with them. If I own a car and my child is sick, I can go get medicine from the all-night pharmacy. I don't want to give up that power just because social planners think I should be happy with a bus or car that I have to plan my life around, not the other way.

This obviously holds less true the further from the city you go but what I'm trying to get at is that you can own a car and still benefit from good public (or in this case, alternate) transport. I still need to keep the car registered and in working order to transport my double bass from time to time and want to keep it that way for all the benefits that you described. What I don't is for me to be shackled to the thing as my only form of transport, much like you don't want to be shackled to a bus timetable.

Just because these services exist, doesn't mean that you need to give up your car to benefit from them (and that's not even going in to benefits provided to people in your community who CAN'T drive).

The not so fun part of it is that if the minivan you are in has nine seats and there are already, say, twenty passengers on it, plus a couple of chickens, the driver will still stop by and collect additional passengers! :)

Minus the chickens of course..

Like buses, you just wait for the next one. So yes, it's a trade-off. Doesn't replace taxis. But it's damn nice when buses aren't readily available, and way more friendly.

The two main issues they encounter, which are related to being private and decentralized, are that routes collect around a few hubs(e.g. "downtown" or "hospital") that guarantee customers, but get vastly over-serviced without a corresponding cross-town option; and they don't have a dedicated right of way, and end up fighting through the city traffic, sometimes getting stalled for hours by uncontrolled, massively over capacity streets.

There is a lot of room for technology to improve on this - if the governments got into the picture and ran a minibus app, they could track and subsidize those services to formalize it, encourage use and reduce inefficiencies, allowing a transit grid to be formed with little formal capital.

But maybe, yeah..

I saw a lady walking along the side of a rural road - this was about 12 years ago, so there weren't buses then, and there won't be in the next 12 years either - so I pulled over and asked her where she was going. Turns out she was going to walk, in the summer heat, to a grocery store about 10 miles away.

We shared my car just fine. But I certainly wouldn't go over to a neighbor and ask for a ride to the grocery store if my car was running ok.

Edit- also, they are still not regulated well as I know of someone who was driving one and he does not even have a drivers license.

When the cell phone companies came up with a service to transfer cell phone credits to other users, people started using that as currency. Only problem is each company runs its own proprietary system and there is no way to send credit to a someone who uses a different cell phone company.

If you think about it, phone companies have the best micro-transaction infrastructure on the planet. They are constantly charging people fractions of a penny per second per phone call.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

debit cards are electronic cash.

I'm guessing that we're secretly talking about Bitcoin here; I think that what BTC needs is some organization that controls a lot of capital, and is willing to underwrite the value of the bitcoin. Fiat currencies work to the extent that their issuing countries can underwrite their value (by accepting the currency in payment of debts, primarily); precious metals work to the extent that there's non-monetary demand for them (so gold isn't actually very valuable in an apocalypse -- look at prices in the Siege of Sarajevo, discussed in a survivalist blog a few years back). Bitcoin doesn't really have either of these. It's a sort of fiscal hot potato -- good for exchange, certainly, but you wouldn't want to be the last person with all the world's bitcoin if everyone else lost interest in it.

The BTC mechanism for attempting price stability on the other hand does the opposite: the supply is designed to grow very steadily, but with no reason whatsoever to believe a stable and sustainable demand for that particular cryptocurrency exists in future.

[1]Hyperinflations occur when the supply of money grows steadily without even bigger growth in future demand obligations, which in practice invariably happens because the government has resorted to printing it to discharge debts and release people from future tax obligations. This actually looks more like a Bitcoin economy (albeit with more potential for the money supply to grow really, really quickly) in that what the government is doing is decoupling supply from demand.

The risk of Wiemar-like circumstances striking again in the West are basically zero, unless a Wiemar-like perfect storm of defeat and ignorance strikes again; and even then, hyperinflation never lasts long (no one can live under it for long). One woman weathered the Wiemar hyperinflation by selling one link of a gold Rosary chain a day to buy food; a quite modest amount of precious metal is enough to outlast this sort of disaster.

How about Venezuela then ?

ZAMBIAN KWACHA

BELARUSIAN RUBLE

All currencies, all are as volatile as can be.

Bitcoin doesn't really have "domestic products", that is things that are denominated in it.

So, low volatility is a quality criterion for money, and those currencies fulfil it (domestically).

In time of war or hyper inflation, domestic currency might get too volatile, and that's when people switch to other money, such a cigarettes or foreign currency.

Source: lived under a hyperinflation of 1900%/year and people did not switch currencies.

Didn't realize how dire the listing situation was there

:-p

m-pesa is a good start, at the least.

- Android phones are dominant in this market, since local manufacturers are able to sell cheap phones without incurring any software development cost.

- Telecommunication sector is heavily privatized in these markets & generally have multiple players offering low cost "pre-paid" services. Recharge stations and mobile stores are pretty ubiquitous - small mom & pop shops double up as resellers of these services , providing last mile coverage.

- On the contrary, Banking infrastructure is so heavily state run. And they don't have the same level of 'ease of access'. So, a lot of people working in the "unorganized sector"(Note: This is an official terminology that governments recognize and use) don't have formal accounts in financial institutions.

- Even if they did, a good number of banks run decade old tools and softwares. Making it all the more difficult to do mobile & online banking .

- And also, most of these economies are not cashless. Culturally and for other reasons,there is more trust on "Paper Cash".

- Finally , just because a person owns a cheap smart phone & ,one cannot assume banking literacy.

[1] https://vulcanpost.com/171862/grabtaxi-uber-challenge-cashle...

One interesting thing an Uber driver told me is that, depending on the area of the city, the majority of people pay with cash or with card. So when he needs cash he drives to a certain area to catch a service.

Here in China you can get long distance ride-sharing to remote locations with the shunfengche service of Dididache. It's very popular, particularly since transportation options to some areas are limited and bus stations are often located in irritatingly obtuse urban peripheral locations.

I know these Stripe-like APIs advertise that building one integration will allow you to send (to driver) and receive (from rider) money in many different currencies, but I have to believe it would be extremely tough to do. Support overhead alone would be large. Is this accurate?

I also imagine that these more remote communities have more of a cash economy than urban communities, but this is a complete guess.