
Germany's Energy Giant Launches Ethereum-Based Electric Car Charging Stations - campbelltown
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/04/29/germanys-energy-giant-launches-100s-ethereum-based-electric-cars-charging-stations
======
Animats
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.

So the headline is somewhat deceptive.

[1] [https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1178726/private-
cust...](https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1178726/private-
customers/frequently-asked-questions/) [2] [https://www.rwe-
mobility.com/web/cms/en/1232368/products-ser...](https://www.rwe-
mobility.com/web/cms/en/1232368/products-services/rwe-epower/rwe-epower-
basic/) [3] [https://shareandcharge.com/en/](https://shareandcharge.com/en/)

~~~
Ursium
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-...](https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-
energy-p2p-sharing-project-share-charge-going-into-live-beta-ad4e069e79dwhich)
might give a bit more context.

~~~
Animats
The article says "has launched". It hasn't?

~~~
Ursium
It's a soft launch. Looks like the media jumped on it a tad too early, but the
proper launch is imminent regardless.

------
RichardHeart
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/](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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
RichardHeart
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.

~~~
darawk
> 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.

~~~
RichardHeart
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.

~~~
darawk
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).

------
scott_ci
There's a recent podcast about this and blockchain + energy sector in general:
[https://epicenter.tv/episode/174/](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.

~~~
haddr
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?

~~~
skybrian
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.

~~~
sanswork
Bitcoin miners fall behind the curve fast enough that if you aren't running
them full time with cheap electricity you are losing money.

------
chinathrow
"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.

------
nnfy
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.

------
jansan
Thumbs up for the charging stations. But How does the customer benefit from
the blockchain payment again?

~~~
Ursium
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.

~~~
joosters
Will you campaign for a hard fork when your contract gets exploited again?

------
contingencies
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.

[0] [http://www.ifex-project.org/our-
proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa...](http://www.ifex-project.org/our-
proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-partial-draft)

[1] [http://kraken.com/](http://kraken.com/)

[2] [http://fiberhood.nl/](http://fiberhood.nl/)

------
milansuk
Do they know that all transactions will be public and great resource for
competitors?

Do they know that blockchain transactions need few confirmations to be trusted
and mining takes time?

~~~
iLoch
No they probably didn't do any research before launching this project.

~~~
davidgerard
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:

[https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-
requirem...](https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirements-
wg/2016-September/000012.html)

[https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-
technica...](https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technical-
discuss/2016-September/000391.html)

The answer is, of course, that most "blockchain initiatives" are hypeware.

------
Ursium
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:

[https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-
project-...](https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-
share-charge-going-into-live-beta-ad4e069e79d)

------
gcb0
how big really is this project? sounds more like something thought up to an
advertising agency.

bmw had tons of billboards advertising the i3 as a digital wallet in
futuristic concept drawings. but again, all the work of advertising agencies.

~~~
Ursium
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.

~~~
davidgerard
The DAO, right, but on the Internet of Things! I'm sure it will all be fine,
fine.

------
ralfd
What is Ethereum? Something like Bitcoin?

~~~
Geee
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.

~~~
ubernostrum
Contracts that run exactly as programmed _unless 51% of the network decides
they don 't_.

~~~
woah
:0

------
andrejc
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?

~~~
Ursium
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...](https://blog.slock.it/slock-it-secures-2-million-usd-seed-funding-to-
build-next-generation-sharing-economy-platform-b795c6d1a92d)) is dedicated to
its development. We're really lucky to have some amazing partners such as
[Canonical]([https://www.canonical.com/](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.

------
xyproto
I don't trust Ethereum. Who's behind it? Are there any backdoors? Why not
Bitcoin?

~~~
DennisP
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.

~~~
RichardHeart
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.

~~~
davidgerard
It's also worth noting the quality of the thinkers at work on it:

[https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-
quest/](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/)

------
red023
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.

