Germany's Energy Giant Launches Ethereum-Based Electric Car Charging Stations
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The way RWE actually works is like cell phone plans. Users have to sign up for a 1-year contract. This gets you an ID token which the charging stations recognize when you plug into the charger. Then there's an EUR 0.30/Kwh charge, which is billed periodically. That's the usual way the system is used.
The Share and Charge system [3] doesn't use Etherium as a currency. They use Euros. Payments are made using SEPA, PayPal, and Sofortüberweisung (which is sort of like Venmo.) They mention that they're using a blockchain, but don't mention Etherium at all. Share and Charge is a third-party payment system for electric charging points. They try to sign up charging point operators to accept their payment system.
So the headline is somewhat deceptive.
[1] https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1178726/private-cust... [2] https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1232368/products-ser... [3] https://shareandcharge.com/en/
There's a lot more information coming up because it's my understanding Carsten only intended his tweet a bit as a 'teaser'. I had written this piece back in September when we entered live beta: https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-... might give a bit more context.
Seems to me like, when it comes to credit, Chaumian cash makes much more sense, since you depend on a central party anyway. The only weakness of Chaumian cash is the central party, but with redeemable tokens you depend on a central party in the first place, since someone needs to redeem the tokens in question.
They even want to store payment tokens (PIN/TAN, however you call it). Yes, you understood it right: they store your secret access tokens to your bank account to make the payment "easy" for you - good luck!
This gives a good impression about technical education in germany, there is still lots of ignorance, not only "on the streets" but also at places where decisions are made.
The ethereum network is a middleman, that has fees and downtime, and the unknowable risk of future forks, downtime and client software choice incompatibilities.
This is their "wallet" https://shareandcharge.com/ which also, as for no other middleman free things, wants you to use the appstore or googleplay to use it.
"“Tomorrow 100s of EV Charging Assets all over Germany Blockchainified. E2E Product using asset-backed Crypto-EURO for payments,” "
Looks like the middlemen added to what could have easily been an interface like any other gas station are, unreliable Ethereum, unreliable appstore, playstore, and fiat currency, with trusting the accountant of that Currency to crypto gateway to maintain your balance.
This is not the distributed future. I'd prefer the charging station have a bill counter that I can feed cash into, that's far less middlemen, far more reliable, and far more secure and anonymous. Cash is king. Also paying by btc instead of requiring an oracle to keep your balance would also be more reliable, and less risky.
Everyone long ETH though, you know what arrow to click.
Wouldn't it be nice if charging your car didn't require: 1. Smart phone. 2. Credits on an oracle. 3. Internet access. 4. Yet another account on yet another third party. 5. More loss of your personal driving and location habits to yet another place.
> Cash is King
The value of cash is subject to the whims of the issuer. The value of a cryptocurrency is subject to the whims of a global market.
They can also be trivially "forked" by creating colored coins which allow you to create a slightly different autonomous AI currency, if the mainline one doesn't do what you need it to. This is the sense in which they are distributed. You can create a new autonomous authority for an arbitrarily small fee, from anywhere in the world.
2. Ethereum has already human intervention rolled back millions of dollars of transactions in "the dao" and they chosen winning and losing implementations whenever there's a network split due to their dual codebases trying to be bug for bug perfect in consensus.
3. You can't increase security or reduce risk, by layer abstractions on top of other things, in this case, the euro.
Smart contracts should never be referred to as "trivial" for many the millions of dollars has been lost over bugs missed in testing.
Colored coins is what VISA already does really really well, with higher uptime, larger network effect, and hell even PCI DSS "security" standards.
I love crypto, especially when it makes things better, not worse.
And once again: the "AI middleman" mentioned above had very strong human opinions during "The DAO" debacle.
That is pretty demonstrably false. A lock is a layer of abstraction on top of metal. That can increase security and reduce risk.
More directly to your point, a set of investments that are, on their own, extremely risky can be set off against one another (i.e. hedged) in such a way as to make the whole far less risky. The idea that you cannot create a low-risk high security product on top of high-risk low-security substrates is simply false.
Understanding that adding variables in serial in order to fuel your car reduces the chance you can successfully fuel your car is easy. Understanding that when the internet goes down, you won't get gas is easy to understand.
Hedges aren't what they're cracked up to be. 1. What happens when your hedge counterpart fails? (check out credit default swaps, or trades that can't execute, or limit down markets, etc etc, bad oracles (credit rating agencies..)) All hedges require a counterparty. Counterparties fail. Even when they don't fail, they become corrupted by bad oracles.
You can't create reliability by wiring variables in series. You can create "security" at the cost of reliablity. How much cash has been lost in "smart" contracts, vs stupid safes per capita.
Metal door welded shut is more secure than a door closed with a metal lock. Harder to use though. But surely more secure.
How are you going to convince everyone to upgrade their POS (either software upgrade or potentially requiring a hardware upgrade) to accept your newly forked cryptocurrency.
Generally speaking, the point of currency is to be able to exchange it for goods or services. That is the main need which people want their currency to do.
The value of cash is closely linked to the value of that denomination on the global market also, so I don't believe cryptocurrency is any different in that respect.
You only need two users to have a healthy currency.
No. Ethereum suffered DoS attacks for a couple of months, but even during the worst of them it had significantly larger tx capacity than Bitcoin.
Do you also imagine there would be wires running between each set of properties? If not you still need a third party to manage the centralized distribution network in which case you're not going to sell directly to your neighbors you're going to sell to the grid.
One interesting idea is having certain energy tagged as "green" energy, like wind generated, which some people might be willing to pay more for.
How do you prevent fraud (bypassing the meter) and who still pays to maintain the grid? Not sure. Is this really more efficient than a private / gov run system? I don't know. Blockchain interacting with real physical assets always seems murky to me.
> Blockchains are "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically."
Blockchains are exactly what they're looking for, they solve the problem perfectly. By design, the blocks in a blockchain are a redundant, scalable, unhackable, cryptographically secure ledger transaction (in theory!).
From wikipedia again:
> All blockchains are distributed ledgers but not all distributed ledgers are blockchains.
Ethereum is a blockchain implementation that has programmable contracts. If you're designing a system like this, and need it to be out in the public and self-governing, it makes sense.
(Even then, proof-of-work mining naturally recentralises, as we see with Bitcoin. Ethereum claims to be planning to move to proof-of-stake, but there's no working implementation or date for this.)
Just because you cannot go to a miner's office doesn't mean that they aren't a middle man. The illusion of direct payments is simply untrue and you need to trust that there will never be more nodes from people that want to fraud the whole system than there are trustworthy ones. You trust complete strangers with your money that you can never meet and never complain about. Worse, you can't even sue them because they are most likely not in your jurisdiction and/or anonymous.
So it's just for PR. No reasonable explanation at all.
As an example in addition to this post, our petroleum company recently began a switch to an ETH based block chain for managing/tracking inventory/data samples. I don't understand how hacking smart contracts together on a private ledger is not total overkill for such function.
[0] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa...
Do they know that blockchain transactions need few confirmations to be trusted and mining takes time?
https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirem...
https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technica...
The answer is, of course, that most "blockchain initiatives" are hypeware.
https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-...
bmw had tons of billboards advertising the i3 as a digital wallet in futuristic concept drawings. but again, all the work of advertising agencies.
It's early days, the tech is young, and we're nowhere near 'mainstream' yet but I'm excited we're finally able to release real-life 'dapps' to the general public so people can experience blockchain for themselves.
Ethereum is probably the second most important one after bitcoin.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...
It is also a valuable cryptocurrency which is used as the payment to run code on the network.
Until the second the whales are in danger of losing money. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/
We expect the first integrations to make their way to the general public during the course of 2018, with some private betas kicking off Q3-Q4 this year.
It has no high fees, for there is no demand for what it does, and if there was demand, no limit to the supply to fill it. Have they decided how much "gas" it takes to run things yet, or are they still manually humanly moving that number around, you know, the only number that would give an ETH any scarcity and thus upward price potential?
NASA knows how to build software that is unlikely to fail, and saves or costs human lives. Little to none of the lessons NASA has learned regarding mission critical software development is used by Ethereum. Being turning complete is the enemy of consensus. The halting problem pretty much makes writing smart contracts that do what you want and nothing else in a turing complete language extremely difficult to the point of near impossiblity.
Thus, ETH may some day be useful for something, but making ETH tokens valuable isn't one of those things.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/