Bitcoin Technology to Fuel P2P Solar Revolution? | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Technology to Fuel P2P Solar Revolution?

understandsolar.com

55 pointsurumcsi14 comments

So how does it use the blockchain? How does the energy physically trade hands? Bitcoin works because its transactions have no physical backing. But it seems to me that at some point in this system I have to say, "I'll buy <x> units of energy from party <y>" and then there needs to be some verification that the party actually delivers the energy. This can be accomplished by 3rd party peers adding sensors on the lines connecting you to <y> but sensors can be fooled, and true consensus would require every party in the system to listen on every single wire, and that's wildly impractical. Or do I just blacklist peers who don't play nicely?

Additionally, how are blockchain identities linked to physical locations? How does <y> know where to deliver the energy I purchased? I wish the author would have thought these questions worth answering, or at least linked to some paper/report that goes into meaningful detail. I find the prospect of a p2p energy network really intriguing!

It uses a blockchain for marketing.

Presumably the company running the ledger keeps track of inputs and outputs and then records them to blockchain.

(sellers of small amounts of power don't need robust distributed consensus, they need a little bit of trust in an entity that pays them for power, and some mechanism for making sure they are getting a reasonable price for the power they sell. A simple way to do that would be to ask their neighbors how much they are paying for the locally generated power...)

The "P2P" thing makes sense. This is solar in an area where the utility buys power at wholesale prices and sells it at retail prices. (Contrast this with some US areas where utilities are required to buy residential solar power at their retail price.) As an alternative to selling power to the utility, it can be sold to nearby non-solar neighbors. The losses are lower and the resale value is higher.

Accounting for this is complicated and somewhat arbitrary. One way this could work is by having metering at both the pole transformer and at the house. Metering at the pole transformer would be at the utility's rates (both buy and sell), while metering between the houses would be at the inter-house rate. Everybody would have to settle up once a month or so. That would just require a monthly meter reading.

But usually, there's no metering at the pole transformer level. That info has to be inferred from minute-by-minute info from the house-level meters. This requires a lot of logging and periodic settlement. If each meter signs its own minute by minute data and sends it in, that prevents after-the-fact fraud. This doesn't require a blockchain, just data signing.

Does everybody get to look at everybody's data, or what? Arguably, you should be able to see your neighbors' data, since you're trading with them.

Call me sceptical but this Blockchain hype is reaching craziness. There seems nothing "distributed" about the mining activities in many examples I have heard of, case in point is this article, which totally undermines the legitimacy of the blockchain they are running in the first instance.

If there are very few participants mining then I truly wonder why people don't just write a basic ledger. The over complication associated with blockchain is horrendous if all you need to do is manage debits and credits. It would also be a lot easier to support, as the pool of genuine blockchain specialists to hire from isn't exactly large.

> I truly wonder why people don't just write a basic ledger

You have to have consensus to trust it, is why. If everyone monitors their box, they can see system output and usage. If everyone logs these observations as "work" and the commit it to the ledger, others can take the data and analyze it for usage to verify you are using/transmitting what your meter says it's doing.

was suspicious it was a puff piece and then this impressive claim was levied. the blockchain technology driving it has been proven to work flawlessly and to be completely safe from fraud Proof of stake though, vs proof of work, first time I'm hearing about that.

Also apparently this is a dry run only, none of the transactions are actually being carried out so I wonder when they'll solve the problem of exchanging their ecochain coins into some other currency.

Yeah, this is a puff piece written by someone who clearly doesn't understand how this technology works.

Proof of Stake, AFAIK has never been tried in a cryptocurrency of any significant value (over $1B). Closest is ethereum which is still on Proof of Work.

$1 billion? That's an awfully high cut off since there aren't any cryptocurrencies in general that meet that requirement besides bitcoin.

I could have set the bar at $150M with the same result. For a currency market cap, $1B is super tiny.

I noticed how you left out crypto in "currency market cap" and just threw all currencies, crypto or not, in one basket.

Cryptocurrency is in its infancy. Proof of stake has had a lot of success and a lot of new currencies have and continue to adopt it.

What more evidence could you realistically expect to show the viability of proof of stake?

I'm a complete layman, but I'm pretty sure I've read that blockchain transfers (bitcoin) is terribly energy-inefficient. I have no idea what orders of magnitude the energy involved for bitcoin transfers or solar transfers though. So, for anyone enlightened enough, is this a bad idea, or would the solar transfers' energy completely outweigh the bitcoin's?

Bitcoin's block chain is energy inefficient because of the computational effort required for the proof of work. Other implementations of a block chain will be more or less energy efficient depending on their proof of work system.

They're using a different system called "proof of stake".

In proof of work, the more work you put in solving hashes the more chance you have of writing the next block of transactions into the block chain (and thereby receiving a reward).

The idea is that if there are more honest miners(people who perform this computation) vs attackers, then the honest miners will always have solved more and harder to compute hashes then the attackers, so any long enough string of blocks the attackers put forth will not have as much work put into them as a corresponding string of blocks by honest miners.

But this is why its energy inefficient, because people compete to put more work in solving hashes, which has no real useful purpose but takes a lot of electricity.

In proof of stake, the greater amount of in-block chain currency you own gives you a greater chance of writing into the block chain and receiving a reward. So it eliminates the work bit, and hence the gobs of electricity people put into it.

There have been various theoretical attacks against proof of stake, and several technological improvements to it to thwart possible attacks. To date, though, no one has been able to successfully attack any major proof of stake currency.

So to answer your question, the energy necessary to run a proof of stake currency is negligible in comparison to a proof of work currency, such as bitcoin.

> The software driving the system is blockchain

Oh great, were can I download blockchain. This article reaks of ignorance.

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