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Germany's Energy Giant Launches Ethereum-Based Electric Car Charging Stations

139 points by campbelltown 9y ago

RichardHeart 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      Testing is the right place for millions to be accidentally lost.
      - dullgiulio 9y ago
        The DAO wasn't a test, or at least the people involved in it didn't realize it at the time. And once again: the "AI middleman" mentioned above had very strong human opinions during "The DAO" debacle.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - darawk 9y ago
      > 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.
- onestone 9y ago
  > Wasn't Ethereum unusable for a a decent percentage of 2017 so far? 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.
gcb0 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    The DAO, right, but on the Internet of Things! I'm sure it will all be fine, fine.
jansan 9y ago
Thumbs up for the charging stations. But How does the customer benefit from the blockchain payment again?
- Ursium 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Will you campaign for a hard fork when your contract gets exploited again?
ralfd 9y ago
What is Ethereum? Something like Bitcoin?
- DennisP 9y ago
  Similar, with much more powerful scripting.
- davidiach 9y ago
  Yes it is. There are actually many different cryptocurrencies (sometimes called altcoins) out there, here is a list of over 700: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ Ethereum is probably the second most important one after bitcoin.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  A cryptocurrency with Smart Contracts. Works a bit like this: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contracts-in-practice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract... https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/
  - RichardHeart 9y ago
    Love the links!
- Geee 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Contracts that run exactly as programmed unless 51% of the network decides they don't.
xyproto 9y ago
I don't trust Ethereum. Who's behind it? Are there any backdoors? Why not Bitcoin?
- DennisP 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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/
  - cashmonkey85 9y ago
chinathrow 9y ago
"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.
milansuk 9y ago
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?
- DennisP 9y ago
  The clever way would be to use payment channels, then it's instant and somewhat private.
- solotronics 9y ago
  id I remember correctly the etherium blockchain adds a block every 10 seconds
- iLoch 9y ago
  No they probably didn't do any research before launching this project.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    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-requirements-wg/2016-September/000012.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirem... https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technical-discuss/2016-September/000391.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technica... The answer is, of course, that most "blockchain initiatives" are hypeware.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - cashmonkey85 9y ago
    You sound like you are being sarcastic but Ethereum is a vaperware scam so yes they did not research the project.
scott_ci 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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?
  - scott_ci 9y ago
    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.
    - SirensOfTitan 9y ago
      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.
      - Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
        Ethereum burns ~1 million dollars of electricity per day. But they seem to be on the way to moving to POS.
  - SirensOfTitan 9y ago
    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.
Ursium 9y ago
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-share-charge-going-into-live-beta-ad4e069e79d https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-...
Animats 9y ago
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-customers/frequently-asked-questions/ https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1178726/private-cust... [2] https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1232368/products-services/rwe-epower/rwe-epower-basic/ https://www.rwe-mobility.com/web/cms/en/1232368/products-ser... [3] https://shareandcharge.com/en/ https://shareandcharge.com/en/
- Ursium 9y ago
  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-share-charge-going-into-live-beta-ad4e069e79dwhich https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-... might give a bit more context.
  - Animats 9y ago
    The article says "has launched". It hasn't?
    - mlvljr 9y ago
      You one of those baby boomers, aren't you? XD
contingencies 9y ago
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-partial-draft http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa... [1] http://kraken.com/ http://kraken.com/ [2] http://fiberhood.nl/ http://fiberhood.nl/
red023 9y ago
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.
nnfy 9y ago
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.
andrejc 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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-funding-to-build-next-generation-sharing-economy-platform-b795c6d1a92d 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/ 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.

139 points by campbelltown 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    Testing is the right place for millions to be accidentally lost.
    - dullgiulio 9y ago
      The DAO wasn't a test, or at least the people involved in it didn't realize it at the time. And once again: the "AI middleman" mentioned above had very strong human opinions during "The DAO" debacle.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - darawk 9y ago
    > 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.
onestone 9y ago
> Wasn't Ethereum unusable for a a decent percentage of 2017 so far? 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.

gcb0 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  The DAO, right, but on the Internet of Things! I'm sure it will all be fine, fine.

jansan 9y ago

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

Ursium 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Will you campaign for a hard fork when your contract gets exploited again?

ralfd 9y ago

What is Ethereum? Something like Bitcoin?

DennisP 9y ago
Similar, with much more powerful scripting.
davidiach 9y ago
Yes it is. There are actually many different cryptocurrencies (sometimes called altcoins) out there, here is a list of over 700: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ Ethereum is probably the second most important one after bitcoin.
davidgerard 9y ago
A cryptocurrency with Smart Contracts. Works a bit like this: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contracts-in-practice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract... https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/
- RichardHeart 9y ago
  Love the links!
Geee 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Contracts that run exactly as programmed unless 51% of the network decides they don't.

xyproto 9y ago

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

DennisP 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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/
- cashmonkey85 9y ago

chinathrow 9y ago

"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.

milansuk 9y ago

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?

DennisP 9y ago
The clever way would be to use payment channels, then it's instant and somewhat private.
solotronics 9y ago
id I remember correctly the etherium blockchain adds a block every 10 seconds
iLoch 9y ago
No they probably didn't do any research before launching this project.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  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-requirements-wg/2016-September/000012.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirem... https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technical-discuss/2016-September/000391.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technica... The answer is, of course, that most "blockchain initiatives" are hypeware.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- cashmonkey85 9y ago
  You sound like you are being sarcastic but Ethereum is a vaperware scam so yes they did not research the project.

scott_ci 9y ago

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 9y ago
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?
- scott_ci 9y ago
  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.
  - SirensOfTitan 9y ago
    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.
    - Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
      Ethereum burns ~1 million dollars of electricity per day. But they seem to be on the way to moving to POS.
- SirensOfTitan 9y ago
  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.

Ursium 9y ago

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

Animats 9y ago

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

Ursium 9y ago
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-share-charge-going-into-live-beta-ad4e069e79dwhich https://blog.slock.it/blockchain-energy-p2p-sharing-project-... might give a bit more context.
- Animats 9y ago
  The article says "has launched". It hasn't?
  - mlvljr 9y ago
    You one of those baby boomers, aren't you? XD

contingencies 9y ago

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-partial-draft http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex/2012-04-11-pa... [1] http://kraken.com/ http://kraken.com/ [2] http://fiberhood.nl/ http://fiberhood.nl/

red023 9y ago

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.

nnfy 9y ago

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.

andrejc 9y ago

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 9y ago
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-funding-to-build-next-generation-sharing-economy-platform-b795c6d1a92d 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/ 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.