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

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/ 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.

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

What is Ethereum? Something like Bitcoin?

"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.

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.