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Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, a heater literally sends electricity through wires, and "wastes" that energy to create heat. One could imagine a heater that uses the electricity/heat from mining for "free". Right, but once people do that, mining becomes more efficient. If mining becomes more efficient, more people start mining, then the difficulty adjusts, and then you're back at the beginning. It's not a bad thing : efficiency gains…
No, mining does not become more efficient. It make it unprofitable for people to mine bitcoin, because they are competing with people who are using free electricity. The only people who would be mining are the ones who are spending 0$ on electricity, because the electricity would otherwise be wasted. By heater, I meant literally a heater in someone's house. The idea is that the only electricity that would be spent on…
I meant "mining becomes more efficient" in the sense that using it as a heater is an efficiency gain over not using it as a heater. I didn't mean to imply that legacy non-heater miners also become more efficient.
Intuitively, you're right. However, I read an article (can't find it now, still looking) that presented a convincing case that if there is $X up for grabs for doing a certain amount of work (mining), then the amount of work that is done increases until $X is being spent on the work. So if you're getting heating out of it as well, X increases, but that just means more mining is done until it's no longer marginally profitable.
But intuitively you're right. So I don't quite know where the mistake lies.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#33Perfect! 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.
" 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/ ? 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, jo…
I'd like to ask more about Proof of Stake's flaws.
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.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#34Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#35Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This conversation has been done a million times, and I don't feel like going through the motions again when it's so easy to look up. The fact is it is different (1) fundamentally, because BoA would use 0 electricity if it could, while it will ALWAYS be worthwhile to spend a certain fraction of Bitcoin's transaction volume on electricity in order to capture transaction fees, and that will ALWAYS involve pointless hash…
Crypto currencies would absolutely use zero electricity if they could too. There are efforts RIGHT NOW to solve this problem. So just like how BOA wastes electricity right now, and is trying to reduce its electricity use, so too are cryptocurrencies. For example, one way to do it is to power the blockchain via "wasted" electricity from other sources, that was going to do nothing anyway. For example, a heater literall…
Crypto currencies will never be as energy efficient as a traditional financial network with trusted players because of the need to calculate pointless hashes (or other variants of proof of work) in order to resolve trust and consensus issues.
For BoA (or other financial institutions), simply sending a message through the trusted financial network saying "I pay you $5" is sufficient. Whereas for BitCoin (or other crypt currencies), a difficult hash has to be calculated that takes many orders of magnitude more energy.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#37Perfect! 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.
It's like the exact opposite of a carbon credit!
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
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.
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 ?
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
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.
The bit that might take it further is
> the blockchain verifies how much the driver owes
Maybe there's something here where it's pulling external data (e.g. set price/unit or a trusted source that says how much was taken) to decide the price?
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#40I'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 toug…
Those pay-as-you-use-it (prepayment) meters still exist!
The first house I rented as a student had one, in 2006. The landlord said the previous tenants had had trouble paying the bills, so the electricity company had insisted on the meter when reconnecting the supply. In reality, I think he'd asked for it to be installed to simplify his job.
Nowadays, the meters are topped up with a smart card, usually at a local newsagent or corner shop. I think we put £100 on it, then forgot about it for several months.
Info and a couple of pictures: https://www.uswitch.com/gas-electricity/guides/prepayment-me...