The Moment Of Truth For Airbnb As User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed

Authorized entry is, and in the case of AirBnB you've got a case where someone's contracted for entry, may have notified neighbors / building management that strangers will be present, etc. (though "hey, strangers will be present, would you mind looking in on things might have been another good practice for EJ).

Your points on locks are very well made, and there's a long Internet (and pre-Internet) history of attempts at censorship by lockmakers against picking methods.

Phone books? How archaic. I don't have a landline -> no phone book entry. My information might be accessible elsewhere, but my perimeter security systems are quite good, and Krell steel resists mosts assaults.

Your idea of "unethical" (to say the least of good business sense) is markedly different from mine.

I do argue that companies are essentially amoral: outside of governments, the only force working on them is the pressure to survive in the face of competition, using whatever means needed to achieve that goal. The only reason companies generally behave in morally acceptable ways is by government regulation. Without those, monopolies on drinking water, oil and other essentials would be acquired and enforced by companies with armies. But the net effect of the current state of affairs is that companies generally behave in morally acceptable ways.

I remember the first time I got screwed on an eBay transaction I thought it was just a random, unfortunate thing -- "well, I've been using this a lot, I guess it was bound to happen." Then it happened again. Pretty quickly I realized that things were going downhill, and the trust I'd put in other users of the service was no longer reasonable.

I think that's the direction that AirBnB is headed, unless they take steps to intentionally restrict their growth and remain in a niche market. Eventually they'll have to do what eBay has done, and make the transactions as anonymous and automated as possible, and probably push all but the big commercial operations (who can absorb the fraud risk that gets pushed onto sellers) out of the market.

But the upside is, I think there's a market for services like AirBnB that are still niche. As AirBnB grows and becomes less and less pleasant to do business with, and as the risk involved in every transaction grows (as it did with eBay), there's an opportunity for someone to create a competitor that's tailored to a specific niche market. Or maybe one that's built on top of a social network, so that you're always renting from a friend of a friend or something. There are a lot of possibilities I could imagine.

But AirBnB seems to be going for mass-market adoption and I think that's the death of a friendly, trusting community if it involves money.

Does this mean that as soon as Brian & co are not involved in day to day operation the service AirBnB offers will deteriorate?

No I'm not. btw i trade options & risk swaps for a living, so I had a good laugh reading your mini tutorial on "this is called option, that is called CDS" :) Anyways, there's lots of holes in your explanation. For one, you say it is illegal to double-insure. Not true. It is illegal to double-dip, not double-insure. So you can get health insurance for yourself from your employer & simultaneously be covered by your spouse's employer - this is quite routine and legal, though frowned upon. What is illegal is to bill both the providers for your expenses. Another eg. you double-insure expensive realty, so if one insurance provider goes out of business, you don't have CP risk. But if there's damages to your house, you can recover losses from only one provider, not both.

As an aside, much of this is enforceable because insurance is such a heavily regulated industry, so you have centralized databases & its easy to check if you are double-insured, double-dipping & other edge cases. With HTBRAI, assuming such a thing ever comes into existence, you'd need a framework for all that regulation to fit in, which is what I'm skeptical about. airbnb is a fine service and they have a sound business model & a solid future - these insurance wrinkles will hopefully be ironed out in due course.