Before Napster ever existed, I once had a job interview with a private toll road on a major California freeway. I know everyone thinks California is for Commies, nowadays, but there's always been a libertarian pocket in Southern California. A guy I know who owns a libertarian bookstore says he used to hang out with Samuel Konklin III in Long Beach and was an AnCap because he thought Konklin was a loser.🤣

Anyway, this private lane was walled off from the adjacent "freeway." To use this private lane, you needed to place a transponder on your window that would charge your credit card an entry fee.

The pricing was dynamic. It might cost 99¢ at 2:00a.m. and $9.00 at 6:00 p.m. If you had 3 or more people, it was free.

I interviewed for a job with the Toll Roads back when it was a start up. The job required watching all the cars entering the private lane without transpomders. If a car had no transponder, they would be sent a ticket in the mail.

I didn't get the job and it was later co-opted by the state of California, but I thought of this after reading The Machinary of Freedom by David Friedman.

Of course, I was already into bitcoin and read the Age of Cryptocurrency by then, so I basically had a real world example of how the thesis of the book could work. These corporations Friedman describes could work simmilar to the private toll roads. The private company spent capital to build the road. They charged a fee to use that road. They had a free-mium version, a paid version, and a fee market. They hired private security(the job I didn't get). They used the government to enforce contracts, but this could just as easily be done with arbitration or some sort of smart contracts(like over the lightning network, I don't mean BS coins)

It's totally possible to build something like a private carpool lane leveraging app simmilar to an app based taxi.

We could build a private Carpooling nostr client with a reputation system that leverages nostrs web of trust. Carpoolers could pay the driver to commute to work faster today. The technology makes it possible anyway. We can do this with or without the Amazon Prime Subscription fee.