Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

trustnodes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 82 posts

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

#51

Post by y2gray »

xyproto wrote: post #7

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

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.

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

#52

Post by woah »

ubernostrum wrote: post #50
Geee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Contracts that run exactly as programmed unless 51% of the network decides they don't .

:0

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

#53

Post by DennisP »

y2gray wrote: post #51
xyproto wrote: post #7

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

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 e…

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.

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

#54

Post by darawk »

RichardHeart wrote: post #46
darawk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 whol…

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 ge…

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).

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

#55

Post by wyldfire »

Geee wrote: post #44
ralfd wrote: post #6

What is Ethereum? Something like 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.

Isn't "decentralized" a stretch?

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

#56

Post by 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.

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

#57

Post by bkanber »

sanswork wrote: post #26
scott_ci wrote: post #23

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 th…

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…

From the wikipedia entry for "blockchain" [0]

> 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

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

#58

Post by sanswork »

bkanber wrote: post #57
sanswork wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From the wikipedia entry for "blockchain" [0] > 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, scalabl…

Could you give me a practical example of how you would use one to solve this problem that couldn't be just as easily solved without one?

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

#59

Post by mlvljr »

Animats wrote: post #47
Ursium wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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

You one of those baby boomers, aren't you?

XD

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

#60

Post by foepys »

scott_ci wrote: post #23

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 th…

> (no middle man)

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.

Post reply on HN