Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
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Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
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Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#2I'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 tough-luck.
Back in the early 80s, I spent part of a summer in a slate-roofed cottage in Wales. The cottage had a box in which you had to insert a coin to turn on the electricity. Like, if you wanted to cook or watch TV that night you had to insert a shilling coin and turn a knob and --- kerchunk --- you'd have electricity until you'd used up your 1d worth of kilowatt-hours and then --- kerchunk --- you were a savage again.
Somehow, paying for electricity at each act of consumption feels bad. Like paying for toilets.
Tesla got it right. I paid $100,000 for the car -- I want hassle-free electricity, thanks.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#3Perfect! 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.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#4But why is there a blockchain?
Why not just charge people?
Crytocurrencies both have large advantages AND disadvantages.
The advantage is that it is a decentralized, censorship resist currency. But if you don't care about the decentralized part of it, then there is no point. Just use a credit card.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#5Perfect! 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.
Bank of America also puts carbon in the air in order to make your debit card work. Those offices cost a lot of money, resources, and carbon in order to keep the lights on and make those databases work.
How are crypto-currencies any different than that?
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#6I'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…
I'm not familiar with how billing for Tesla's chargers work, except that some of the high end models include free charging (or at least they used to). Are you saying the electricity should be free, or simply that you prefer to pay monthly based on usage?
This startup seems like a stepping stone to me. Eventually you should be able to define limits (max $/kWh, min charge rate, min time available, max distance) and the app should just show you available stations. Billing can happen automatically.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#7Perfect! 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.
Bank of America also puts carbon in the air in order to make your debit card work. Those offices cost a lot of money, resources, and carbon in order to keep the lights on and make those databases work. How are crypto-currencies any different than that?
Bank of America processes orders of magnitude more transactions per ton of CO2 emissions.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#8But why is there a blockchain? Why not just charge people? Crytocurrencies both have large advantages AND disadvantages. The advantage is that it is a decentralized, censorship resist currency. But if you don't care about the decentralized part of it, then there is no point. Just use a credit card.
Because it seems these days projects tend to attract funds just because of mentioning the word 'blockchain'.
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#9Perfect! 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.
Bank of America also puts carbon in the air in order to make your debit card work. Those offices cost a lot of money, resources, and carbon in order to keep the lights on and make those databases work. How are crypto-currencies any different than that?
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 hashes. GPU /ASIC efficiency gains will only drive more miners to mine.
(2) obviously, just look at the comment chains on previous posts for numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751971); bitcoin burns a stupid amount of electricity to process a minute fraction of BoA's volume
Re: Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California
#10I'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…
I use ChargePoint a lot. If the charger isn't broken, it takes significantly less time than dealing with a gas station. 9 times out of 10, I know ahead of time whether a charger is broken or busy.
As for their monetization strategy, I think chargers should require a maintenance contract and that that should be built into the kWh cost. Pay at the pump. I do not like to see free chargers because everyone uses them and no one maintains them because they're not getting paid for.
A buck an hour should be the minimum for 6kWh L2. $5/hr if you leave it 30 minutes past full.
As for the blockchain idea, this seems strange. Too much solution for not enough problem. I don't want to use some random person's L2 in a neighborhood. I could imagine an emergency thing but that's about it.