What they actually end-up doing is competing the incumbent services in a fly bellow the radar illegal operation which actually makes the taxi drivers themselves poorer while diverting most of the extra cash to the ring masters.
In the original barter economies, it was difficult to find someone who had something you want in exchange for something you had, but now there are much more efficient ways to streamline that search process.
As to the potential value, to tsotha's question, this is very philosophical. Some will see it as valuable, others will be terrified. For me personally, I like not being too abstracted away from what I'm producing or consuming.
Gambling uses chips because chips are easier to give away than money. Using that logic, at least for me, giving away money is easier than trading something, especially if that something I have created and poured my energy into. The transaction without money then forces me to think about true utility and value, and would greatly discourage conspicuous and contrived consumption.
That's a good point. The question is how likely it is for new technology to connect you and the painter such that you don't need money.
The question I have is what's the utility of avoiding money beyond tax dodging?
You say this as if it would be a step forward instead of a huge step back. The whole idea of a market economy is that you can trade what you have for what you want, even if the person who has what you want doesn't want what you have. Money is used to facilitate this kind of indirect trade. This system is superior to the system you advocate, wherein, if I have ten pounds of corn and want a painting, I need to find a painter who wants corn.
If the only place Lyft will take me is the football stadium, Lyft isn't a useful app, or a useful anything else. I won't bother to use it even on the rare occasion when the football stadium is where I want to go. The point of a transportation service is that it takes me where I want to go, not that it takes me to a random location depending on which driver I happened to contact, and not that if I want to go someplace out-of-the-way I need to wait for possibly a period of months.