
Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California - noomerikal
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/blockchain-enabled-electric-car-charging-california
======
tlb
I'd love to have an alternative to ChargePoint for charging my Tesla at
airports. It takes multiple minutes of diddling around with their app to make
their charger's relay contacts close. They have reviews within their app,
wherein people report which of their chargers usually work, which sometimes
work, and which never work. In no case is the actual power faulty -- it's
their monetization strategy that fails to tough-luck.

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.

~~~
CalChris
I use ChargePoint a lot. If the charger isn't broken, it takes significantly
less time than dealing with a gas station. 9 times out of 10, I know ahead of
time whether a charger is broken or busy.

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.

~~~
foota
I don't have an electric car, but I was under the impression that filling a
tank up took a significant amount of time?

s/tank/battery

~~~
mulmen
You don't have to stand at the car while it charges so the time comparison
should really just be how long it takes to plug in and pay. This assumes the
charger is at a location you are already visiting. If we accept that
assumption you also save the time you went out of your way to a gas station.

~~~
CalChris
That is what I meant. The OP is at the airport and wants to set the car
charging. This really doesn't take long at all if the charger is working.

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.

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alistproducer2
I read the article and no where does it make a case for why a blockchain makes
any sense in the application. I read a comment by a person claiming to be
associated with the project saying that "blockchain enabled" makes sense
because the payment are p2p but that doesn't make sense either. Blockchains
are good for pretty much one thing: a distributed ledger that parties can
trust to be immutable. I can confidently say they're only inserting a
blockchain here because it gets the idea more buzz.

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

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I fill up my Jeep about once a week. At an average cost of $25 to fill over
the course of 52 weeks, that's $1,300.

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.

~~~
cr0sh
As a fellow Jeep owner (2004 TJ, {waves - lol}), I was sitting here wondering
how you "fill up" a Jeep with only $25.00 (@ approx $2.00 per gallon - that'd
be 12.5 gallons of gas per fill up). So I googled things - found this:

[http://www.jeepforum.com/forum/f9/gas-tank-
size-249444/](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.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Yeah that's kinda what I meant. I don't burn a whole tank each week but I
roughly fill it up weekly. Besides it was meant to be more a comparison of
marginal rather tha absolute cost.

2015 Patriot (fist bump), if that makes a difference in the calculation.

------
jstanley
Cryptocurrency enthusiast here.

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.

~~~
iMuzz
> Obviously there is no benefit to having this on a blockchain here.

\- 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?

~~~
jstanley
Those are properties of using cryptocurrency for payment, they're not
properties of putting car charging on a blockchain.

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.

~~~
laydn
When I read the headline, I immediately thought that it meant I could pay for
charging with Bitcoin and/or Ethereum.

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 ?

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bosslevel
As someone associated with this project, I can inform you that the reason the
words "blockchain enabled" are used is because the Share and Charge platform
enables peer-to-peer payments between car charger and private (not commercial)
charging pole owner via the blockchain. As it happens however, as this is a
pilot in a new country (US) with new compliance requirements, there are no
actual cash payments taking place for now. And as for the electricity cost of
Proof of Work, we're actually looking to move to a special purpose chain using
Proof of Authority in the near future.

------
bpodgursky
Perfect! Put a few tons of carbon in the air pointlessly calculating hashes to
mine *coins, and then use those e-coins to charge your electric car.

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.

~~~
mrb
" _Put a few tons of carbon in the air pointlessly calculating hashes to mine
coins_ "

It's not pointless. Have you read the arguments in
[http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-
wasteful/](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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I'd like to ask more about Proof of Stake's flaws.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-
stake#Criticism](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.

~~~
RoboTeddy
AFAIK Ethereum plans to resolve this "nothing at stake" issue by using
security deposits. If someone submits a proof that a miner was staking on
multiple chains, the miner loses their security deposit.

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)

That said, this all looks _hard_ to get right...

------
stale2002
But why is there a blockchain?

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.

~~~
waltero
Because it seems these days projects tend to attract funds just _because_ of
mentioning the word 'blockchain'.

~~~
cr0sh
I need to pitch to YC my idea of a blockchain-enabled, cloud-hosted deep-
learning platform based on TensorFlow.

/probably needs more buzzwords //probably has been done ///probably already
funded by YC...meh

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xg15
OT, can anyone explain this idiom to me?

> _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?

~~~
davidgerard
It's the 100% certain tell of a bad article. Worse if they capitalise it.

~~~
xg15
That was my suspicion. Reminds me of "one internet please"...

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xurukefi
[http://doyouneedablockchain.com/](http://doyouneedablockchain.com/)

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kaishiro
Christ. This is one of those titles I read and go "am I the crazy one or are
they? .....ok, it's them."

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0x006A
[https://blog.slock.it/share-charge-smart-contracts-the-
techn...](https://blog.slock.it/share-charge-smart-contracts-the-technical-
angle-58b93ce80f15) has some details on how Share&Charge uses Ethereum
blockchain as a transaction layer

------
0x006A
Brought to you by Slock.it, the company that built the DAO, what could
possibly go wrong.

------
TheSpecialist
"If bitcoin is digital gold then Ethereum is digital oil" analogy taken too
seriously.

