Comment by RichardHeart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RichardHeart | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

Testing is the right place for millions to be accidentally lost.

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.

> 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.

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 get in also increases.

Understanding that adding variables in serial in order to fuel your car reduces the chance you can successfully fuel your car is easy. Understanding that when the internet goes down, you won't get gas is easy to understand.

Hedges aren't what they're cracked up to be. 1. What happens when your hedge counterpart fails? (check out credit default swaps, or trades that can't execute, or limit down markets, etc etc, bad oracles (credit rating agencies..)) All hedges require a counterparty. Counterparties fail. Even when they don't fail, they become corrupted by bad oracles.

You can't create reliability by wiring variables in series. You can create "security" at the cost of reliablity. How much cash has been lost in "smart" contracts, vs stupid safes per capita.

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).

> A lock is a layer of abstraction on top of metal. That can increase security and reduce risk.

Metal door welded shut is more secure than a door closed with a metal lock. Harder to use though. But surely more secure.

Imagine every service station across <big continent> now accepts Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ten years pass. Most vendors now have 10-ish year old Point Of Sales systems.

How are you going to convince everyone to upgrade their POS (either software upgrade or potentially requiring a hardware upgrade) to accept your newly forked cryptocurrency.

Generally speaking, the point of currency is to be able to exchange it for goods or services. That is the main need which people want their currency to do.

The value of cash is closely linked to the value of that denomination on the global market also, so I don't believe cryptocurrency is any different in that respect.

I probably wouldn't need most or even many to use my currency. If I wanted a general purpose currency I'd use one of the extant ones.

You only need two users to have a healthy currency.

Cash value is not determined by the global market because the issuer can change the supply.

> 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.

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