Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
greentechmedia.com
greentechmedia.com
Back in the early 80s, I spent part of a summer in a slate-roofed cottage in Wales. The cottage had a box in which you had to insert a coin to turn on the electricity. Like, if you wanted to cook or watch TV that night you had to insert a shilling coin and turn a knob and --- kerchunk --- you'd have electricity until you'd used up your 1d worth of kilowatt-hours and then --- kerchunk --- you were a savage again.
Somehow, paying for electricity at each act of consumption feels bad. Like paying for toilets.
Tesla got it right. I paid $100,000 for the car -- I want hassle-free electricity, thanks.
This startup seems like a stepping stone to me. Eventually you should be able to define limits (max $/kWh, min charge rate, min time available, max distance) and the app should just show you available stations. Billing can happen automatically.
- the app must be installed and updated
- it must get an accurate location from GPS to look up the ID number of closest station (and often they're adjacent, so the next one is 12' away).
- my cellular data, and the base station's cellular data have to work
- all inside a concrete parking garage.
so it only works 3/4 of the time.
As for their monetization strategy, I think chargers should require a maintenance contract and that that should be built into the kWh cost. Pay at the pump. I do not like to see free chargers because everyone uses them and no one maintains them because they're not getting paid for.
A buck an hour should be the minimum for 6kWh L2. $5/hr if you leave it 30 minutes past full.
As for the blockchain idea, this seems strange. Too much solution for not enough problem. I don't want to use some random person's L2 in a neighborhood. I could imagine an emergency thing but that's about it.
s/tank/battery
If the charger isn't working that's because someone didn't fix it. That's usually because there isn't a maintenance contract and people didn't pay enough for said maintenance contract. When you buy gas there are use taxes for road maintenance. Kinda like that.
Considering that most interactions at a gas station are over in 2 minutes, this seems to be a revolutionary fast charging technology!
The first house I rented as a student had one, in 2006. The landlord said the previous tenants had had trouble paying the bills, so the electricity company had insisted on the meter when reconnecting the supply. In reality, I think he'd asked for it to be installed to simplify his job.
Nowadays, the meters are topped up with a smart card, usually at a local newsagent or corner shop. I think we put £100 on it, then forgot about it for several months.
Info and a couple of pictures: https://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/guides/prepayment-me...
Side note: I had no idea people paid so much to charge they're EVs. the article mentioned that a electric bill in Cali can be upwards of $1000/yr.
Edit for clarity: the $1000/yr figure is the marginal cost of charging the EV, not the entire bill
Of course I don't have the added bonus of being able to charge from solar power, but at least that shows that the cost of electricity isn't prohibitive versus the cost of gasoline.
Ugh, you also don't have the added bonus with an EV to just fill up when necessary.
http://www.jeepforum.com/forum/f9/gas-tank-size-249444/
Of course, that whole discussion just throws a bunch of wrenches into the works; maybe you do have the 15 gallon tank on a older model (newer JKs have much larger tanks supposedly)? And apparently there's still more in the tank even once the light comes on (a few gallons reserve)?
I've never "buried the needle" on my Jeep yet, so I have no idea what size tank I have.
2015 Patriot (fist bump), if that makes a difference in the calculation.
I live in Phoenix, AZ - my electric bill is rarely ever under $100.00 per month; in the summertime it can edge upwards to close to $400.00 a month.
I don't have an electric car, either.
/two A/C units on a 2000 sf house will do that, tho...
This is exactly the sort of nonsense that people are doing that makes other people think the entire cryptocurrency community is a joke. Obviously there is no benefit to having this on a blockchain here. You can just pay the charging station.
I made a comment the other day that there is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and people who want to blockchain-all-the-things. It was heavily downvoted and I suspect people didn't believe me, so I'm going to keep repeating it until people believe me :)
Don't write off cryptocurrency just because of nonsense like this. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero (and a small handful of other coins) are genuinely worthwhile projects.
(I've read it now)
EDIT: Not that the misleading headline makes it a worse project. I actually think "use cryptocurrency to pay for anything" is a good project. But it's not blockchain-enabled. And that's a good thing.
Money can be cashed-in to your Share&Charge wallet by using credit card, PayPal...
In addition to the Blockchain technology we developed our Share&Charge App, which builds the point of intersection between the users and the Blockchain.
https://blog.slock.it/share-charge-launches-its-app-on-board...
At the moment, this token cannot be traded and is reserved for use exclusively within the Share&Charge project, however, an e-money license being sought by the payment provider xtech of the project could see its use extended to it to other fields.
That's all?
- Minuscule transaction fees as opposed to 3% banking fees.
- Less necessary server infrastructure to manage identity/payments
Would these not be benefits or am I missing something?
I think that's what this project does, and the headline is simply misleading. It's not really "blockchain-enabled", it just uses Ethereum for payment.
What else can be inferred from the headline? What would it mean to "put car charging on a blockchain"? Can you explain for the rest of us ?
> the blockchain verifies how much the driver owes
Maybe there's something here where it's pulling external data (e.g. set price/unit or a trusted source that says how much was taken) to decide the price?
Of course not. You're paying for customer service, marketing, fraud protection & settlement, and a host of other things with that 3%. It's not 3% because that's what it costs to run a computer to figure out payment processing, it's 3% because that's what the banks can charge to run their business. In effect most people pay 2% or less because of credit card points, so really it's just a forced discount on retailers. Again, because the banks can.
Probably because:
1. you're making a historically false claim. Pushing "blockchain" to business is quite well documented (Digital Gold, contemporary press) as being something that was pushed by the Bitcoin fans at the time - late 2014, when the bitcoin price was cratering - as a way to keep interest up.
2. the claims for "Blockchain" (and even the further euphemism, "Digital Ledger Technology") are blatantly the most fantastic claims for Bitcoin, with only the buzzword changed.
3. the bitcoin blog press can't get enough of these "blockchain" initiatives. Clearly their readers think it's all much the same thing.
This uses Ethereum so when they eventually move to proof-of-stake I'll mostly retract my scorn, but for now I stand by this being counterproductive and dumb.
How are crypto-currencies any different than that?
The fact is it is different
(1) fundamentally, because BoA would use 0 electricity if it could, while it will ALWAYS be worthwhile to spend a certain fraction of Bitcoin's transaction volume on electricity in order to capture transaction fees, and that will ALWAYS involve pointless hashes. GPU /ASIC efficiency gains will only drive more miners to mine.
(2) obviously, just look at the comment chains on previous posts for numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751971); bitcoin burns a stupid amount of electricity to process a minute fraction of BoA's volume
There are efforts RIGHT NOW to solve this problem. So just like how BOA wastes electricity right now, and is trying to reduce its electricity use, so too are cryptocurrencies.
For example, one way to do it is to power the blockchain via "wasted" electricity from other sources, that was going to do nothing anyway. For example, a heater literally sends electricity through wires, and "wastes" that energy to create heat. One could imagine a heater that uses the electricity/heat from mining for "free".
Or even at a more basic level, imagine a electric dam, that produces so much power during certain times in the day, that it has to sell it for negative prices on the market. Thats Free energy right there!
Another example is Proof of Space algorithms. The way it works is instead of using GPU heavy hashing algorithms, you use "Space" intensive hashing algorithms.
The reason why you do this is because there is a TON of extra hard disk space that is just lying around doing nothing. We could take that extra space for "free" and use it to secure a blockchain (while allowing the user to reclaim the space at any time with no effort), and it would cost very little electricity.
Right, but once people do that, mining becomes more efficient. If mining becomes more efficient, more people start mining, then the difficulty adjusts, and then you're back at the beginning.
It's not a bad thing: efficiency gains are good. But they don't reduce the total energy expenditure, because they incentivise increased mining.
The only people who would be mining are the ones who are spending 0$ on electricity, because the electricity would otherwise be wasted.
By heater, I meant literally a heater in someone's house.
The idea is that the only electricity that would be spent on the blockchain is electricity that was going to be sent down the drain anyway.
Intuitively, you're right. However, I read an article (can't find it now, still looking) that presented a convincing case that if there is $X up for grabs for doing a certain amount of work (mining), then the amount of work that is done increases until $X is being spent on the work. So if you're getting heating out of it as well, X increases, but that just means more mining is done until it's no longer marginally profitable.
But intuitively you're right. So I don't quite know where the mistake lies.
I think it's a stretch to say the two are perfectly linked.
If you dropped someone's electricity price in half, would they buy twice the equipment to mine? If you dropped it to 1%, would they buy 100x as much equipment?
For BoA (or other financial institutions), simply sending a message through the trusted financial network saying "I pay you $5" is sufficient. Whereas for BitCoin (or other crypt currencies), a difficult hash has to be calculated that takes many orders of magnitude more energy.
Compare that to say air travel
It's not pointless. Have you read the arguments in http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/ ? It's not Ethereum-specific but the same logic applies. I feel I post that link too frequently, but people get too often mentally blocked on one technical detail (hashing) and fail to think about the big picture (renewables, jobs created, real utility of cryptos, etc). If cars with internal combustion engines were introduced today, would HNers complain its a dumb tech because it wastes 97% of the fuel's energy?[1]
[1] 90% wasted moving 1.5 tons of metal and only 150 kg of useful cargo/passengers, and remaining 7% wasted mostly as heat/friction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake#Criticism
These problems seem fairly significant and unresolved. Thoughts?
Statistical simulations have shown that simultaneous forging on several chains is possible, even profitable. But Proof of Stake advocates believe most described attack scenarios are impossible or so unpredictable that they are only theoretical.
Any system that will eventually attain a $1T market cap probably can't have theoretical issues like this.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
That said, this all looks hard to get right...
... for return to date of zero. This is literally broken-windows economics.
Why not just charge people?
Crytocurrencies both have large advantages AND disadvantages.
The advantage is that it is a decentralized, censorship resist currency. But if you don't care about the decentralized part of it, then there is no point. Just use a credit card.
/probably needs more buzzwords //probably has been done ///probably already funded by YC...meh
It's just car charging where you pay using Ethereum.
> The peer-to-peer concept relies on blockchain, one of today's hottest trends [...]
Note the missing article. Not "relies on the blockchain" or "relies on a blockchain" but "relies on blockchain" as if that were some kind of new elemental resource like water or electricity.
I've noticed that expression in quite a few articles. DOes anyone know where it comes from?