Isn’t Uber the same as hitch hiking? Trust today

How trust, transparency and tech is changing consumerism.
Are you a micropreneur? If not, you’ve probably interacted with one recently. A micropreneur is an entrepreneur who accepts the risk of starting and managing a very small type of business to gain more time for life. Every time we stay at an Airbnb or ride in an Uber or Lyft we are engaging in and supporting micropreneurship. The Airbnb homeowners and Uber and Lyft car owners are micropreneurs. In fact, many sellers on Ebay, Amazon Marketplace and Etsy are micropreneurs.
Technology enables micropreneurs to flourish
Technology is leveling the playing field, allowing micropreneurs to enter the marketplace with low startup costs. Anyone with a smartphone can conduct market research, post their product or service for sale, process payments and create marketing materials including video and market to their ideal client.

Micropreneurs are changing the way we define trust in today's economy. Collectively, we now support peer-to-peer business models where buyers and sellers transact directly with each other resulting in the creation of multiple marketplaces. Marketplace expansion in turn is allowing more and more micropreneurs to participate, and this participation is based on trust and reputation.

Transparency is at the forefront of this movement, meaning all marketplace users have the option of rating every transactional experience. The buyer is rating the seller and the quality of the merchandise and the seller is rating the buyer. A positive or negative transaction rating is based on each personal experience. The cumulation of these rating forms the reputation. People are putting more trust in individual personal judgment and experiences. A micropreneur can have a much better reputation than a medium or large sized organization and a higher level of trust. There is a steady decline in many large corporate brands, such as Sears, Chipotle and even Starbucks.

Technology allows us to separate from large controlling companies, banks and governments.

Society is putting trust into the micropreneur as seen in the rapid growth of companies like Uber.

Humans are placing more confidence and trust in the unknown in hopes of growing a stronger democratic society.

We are witnessing the collapse of trust in our banks as cryptocurrency is disrupting currency exchange.

The digital age is advancing rapidly, no is the time to create a culture of trust and accountability.

Organizations need to build a collaborative trust strategy that is managed by the collective.

Blockchain technology in its simplest form is what binds many unknown single entities together establishing a secure block of data. This is now becoming how we trust today and will be the way we remove third party institutions from regulating exchanges of goods and services.

The world-wide-web has changed the way we exchange information and blockchain will be the shift in trust as we place more trust in micropreneurs than in institutions.