Wasn't Ethereum unusable for a a decent percentage of 2017 so far? " charging and billing solution with no middleman is created.”
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.
Ethereum is an autonomous AI middleman, but yes it is a middleman. One whose plans and actions you can determine determinalistically.
> 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.
1. They only accept euros. So you get to multiply the euro risk times the ethereum risk times their oracle keeping your balance on ethereum risk.
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.
> 3. You can't increase security or reduce risk, by layer abstractions on top of other things, in this case, the euro.
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.
Nope. Depends on what kind of security you are looking for. Which door is more likely to reliably allow me to enter my home? 1. No door. 2. A door with N locks in parallel. 3. A door with N locks in series. As N increases, or goes serial instead of parallel, my ability to enter my own home reliably decreases. Consequently, assuming so side channel attacks (windows or other doors) the chance that other people can't get in also increases.
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.
None of that is correct. 'Series' or 'parallel' are the wrong way to think about things. If you buy 100 shares of AAPL and then you buy a put on SPY, that position is objectively lower risk than the unhedged AAPL position. Your point about counterparties is irrelevant, as I didn't claim that a hedge causes risk to go to zero - merely that it reduces it. It is possible for two risky things to cancel one another (or some components of one another, as in the AAPL/SPY example, the SPY put hedges AAPL's beta).
Imagine every service station across <big continent> now accepts Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ten years pass. Most vendors now have 10-ish year old Point Of Sales systems.
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.
I'm not yet allowed to give out numbers but it's going to be the largest IoT + Blockchain deployment on the planet.
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.
Stephan from Slock.it here. Essentially the idea is to recoup the cost of your investment in a charging station by renting it to other electric vehicle drivers that might be passing by. Can't wait to be able to tell you more about it on our blog.
Yes it is.
There are actually many different cryptocurrencies (sometimes called altcoins) out there, here is a list of over 700:
http://coinmarketcap.com/
Ethereum is probably the second most important one after bitcoin.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
It is also a valuable cryptocurrency which is used as the payment to run code on the network.
> Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
It has the second-biggest market cap at $6 billion, it's been in production for a couple years, it has multiple open source implementations, its inventors and other developers are known to the public, it has much more powerful smart contract capabilities than Bitcoin, and it doesn't have high fees and backlogs.
The multiple implementations exponentially increase the breakdown of consensus. The network is literally unusable often. Their consensus is so bad, that the last breakdown of consensus created the nunber 6 crypto marketcap "currency" "etherum classic" which has "value" of $485 million as this is written.
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.
There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.
VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.
I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.
i think its worth pointing out that the same company is behind this charging station project -- slock.it -- was also behind the dao disaster, they coded the smart contract that had the bug that was exploited and led to the hack of tens of millions of invested dollars and the biggest controversy in the history of ethereum. which sadly led to this guy Stephan Tual (ursium) --who is commenting on this thread about how excited he is for his revolutionary project -- basically resorting to conspiracy theory to deflect responsibility for his company's lack of due diligence and false claims such as code audits for the contract. ethereum is a very interesting project but this guy is a snake.
They did code that project, but it's also worth pointing out that the exploit in question wasn't widely known in the community until a week prior to the hack, when TheDAO was already live. Even some of the official tutorial material on the ethereum.org website had similar vulnerabilities.
"Explaining why he is using a blockchain at all, Stöcker says because the “future of business will be fuelled by the #MachineEconomy … Machines – such as autonomous cars.”"
So it's just for PR. No reasonable explanation at all.
You might be surprised how little research companies do before launching blockchain initiatives. After creating the Hyperledger consortium, IBM were actually surprised when it turned out business didn't want to share all their dealings with all their competitors, but only with the specific other business each deal is with:
There's a recent podcast about this and blockchain + energy sector in general: https://epicenter.tv/episode/174/ Why blockchain? It enables peer-to-peer buying and selling of electricity (no middle man), which becomes more interesting as the grid itself is becoming more decentralized with solar, etc. Imagine being able to buy and sell electricity directly between you and your neighbors. Lots of questions about how this is metered & controlled, but it seems promising.
I wonder how they justify the use of proof of work to maintain consensus. Wouldn't it consume a significant amount of the electricity generated by those solar panels?
the plan for ethereum is to switch to proof-of-stake, but that has definitely not been figured out yet. I could also see a more private blockchain supporting stuff like this. Maybe it's not open to anonymous participants, but is still more distributed than a single company.
I find movement to PoS perhaps the most important milestone toward large scale adoption of Ethereum or any cryptocurrency-related technology. PoW just isn't feasible for large scale deployment: way too much energy is wasted for consensus.
Proof of stake (PoS) is certainly the future for consensus. Ethereum has a built-in proof-of-work difficulty ramp up already started (a time bomb) and has had plans to move to PoS since the beginning.
I'm guessing there's wasted electricity that solar panels generate at inconvenient times? If the power is "free" (not being used for anything else) at least they can mine Bitcoins.
How does a blockchain make that setup easier? You need to a system in place to track who is selling to who so if you have that it's just as easy to have it do bank transfers as it is blockchain ones.
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.
I imagine a marketplace with a ledger of electrons and money, with smart switches and meters that directly interact with this marketplace.
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.
There are none. The only practical example where a blockchain does things a centralised database doesn't is a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency.
(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.
If Ethereum actually worked as an autonomy trustless network (which is what the project claimed to be) then there would be no middle man. But Ethereum is just vaperware and a marketing project
On the site for RWE's charging points, there's no mention of this.[1]
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.
Actually, the Euro Token is a virtual FIAT implemented on Ethereum. I can't reveal much more information on it until the project formally goes live (which is imminent), but I can't tell you it thankfully goes a lot further than what you noted.
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.
Who is the debitor in this scenario? In other words, who sends me 1000 EUR via SEPA when I cash in my 1000 virtual Euro tokens?
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.
Note that "Sofortüberweisung" is a service where people do store their private bank account data (!) - when I first saw that I was sure it was a joke, but people are using it.
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.
Recently I restarted thinking on IFEX[0], a generic transaction protocol for arbitrary assets/settlement systems conceived in 2012 while building Kraken[1]. One of the four pilot use cases we are considering is energy routing within next-generation, renewables-focused, community-owned electricity and data infrastructure.[2] We are building an interesting team: one of the collaborators is a European inventor with significant experience in this area and some contact with major electric vehicle brands who would like a safe solution for rapid charging, another is a maths/physics guy with nontrivial quantitative finance experience ($3bn+ under management). We also have conventional and distributed manufacturing and logistics as pilot use cases. If anyone would like to collaborate feel free to get in touch.
Hi, Stephan from Slock.it here - there's going to be a lot more info about this project coming up, but I wrote this blog post back in September when we entered live beta. I hope you find it helps answers some questions:
RWE (well like pretty much every big cooperation) is very corrupt and immoral. They for example fought hard against Germany's plans to end Atom Power plants. So I am not really to happy about this news. They are in for the money thats it.
Why do I feel like etherium is being crammed into all kinds of places where it really isn't necessary, and offers little or no real benefit over conventional solutions? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here.
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.
Could someone not build something similar, but for WiFi routers instead of charging stations?. I.e. a company selling or renting pre-programmed WiFi routers that sell bandwidth directly to the users. Anyone could buy or rent one and put it inside their private space that is within a public zone (e.g. cafes and restaurants). Thoughts?
Ah yes, what you describe is what Christoph Jentzsch dubbed the Universal Sharing Network, or USN. Slock.it [recent round of seed funding](https://blog.slock.it/slock-it-secures-2-million-usd-seed-fu...) is dedicated to its development. We're really lucky to have some amazing partners such as [Canonical](https://www.canonical.com/) to help bring this to life.
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.
81 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadThe 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.
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...
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/
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/
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/
So it's just for PR. No reasonable explanation at all.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
(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.
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.
XD
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.
[0] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa...
[1] http://kraken.com/
[2] http://fiberhood.nl/
https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-...
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.
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.