Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

I'm sad to see this. I admire Steve Wozniak, and love what he did to the world.

At the same time, I fear that he has picked a weird way to address climate change.

It is VERY unclear from the beginning what Efforce actually is. Almost at the bottom, you see it's an ICO.

Perhaps we can describe it as the equivalent of a carbon offsetting marketplace, just for energy?

Well, if that's the case... It doesn't need a blockchain, and it doesn't need a token. It can be done, today, in dollars and euros.

If there's a token, and a token sale, Efforce and its founders will benefit from it, even if their efforts will not positively impact the world. That's unfair.

Why not, instead, reward them in a "normal" way - create an energy efficiency marketplace, earn a commission on the energy "traded" there, voilà. No blockchain, no token sale, no bullshit.

Am I wrong? If so, what did I not understand?

Edit: I see that EFFORCE is listed/tradeable, and apparently worth ~$950M already, which makes me even more suspicious... [0]

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-wozniaks-blockchain-ven...

> The company is registered in Malta because the Apple co-founder said he had long wanted to invest in the region. "It has been on my mind for decades. Like no other place in the world," he said.

Statements like this make me question the truthiness of the entire venture. If they chose Malta for specific tax reasons or laws, just say so! Most rational people are going to read this and have their bullshit detector go off (for better or for worse).

I agree with both your comment and the one you are responding to. I just hope that this venture isn't targeting non-rational people out there... even though it certainly looks like it is.

Your default assumption should be that ICOs are fraud.

This assumption should be strong enough that attaching a famous name to them should not change your position much.

The restriction free rewards for issuing an ICO are nearly unfathomable. Millions to billion dollars of dumb money flowing it based only on tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. Some people find it easy to rationalize.

In a situation like this involved parties might feel it's justified because the money they're defrauding out of the public could be applied to a virtuous cause.

> Your default assumption should be that ICOs are fraud.

Are they ever not fraud or a scheme to enrich the architects of the scheme?

Maybe, which is why I said 'default'. But the lack of good practices or protections means even that the most earnestly run one is extremely risky and likely to ultimately yield fraud like returns to their investors due to honest errors.

Moreover, there is a huge lemon market problem: If if an issuer is in the the (say) 1% of honest efforts they are in constant competition with fraud, under pressure to make misleading fraud-like promises and offer fraud-like returns-- prudent parties realize this and exit knowing that they have better options. So investors are left with the honest participants that were too clueless to realize this or not attractive enough to have other alternatives.

Sia and Avalanche are some of the least sketchy.

Note that startups also enrich their founders, although usually not in massive upfront cash payments.

> Are they ever not fraud or a scheme to enrich the architects of the scheme?

The Ethereum ICO is a good, rare example of non-fraudulent ICO.

Steve Wozniak has been a charlatan for the past twenty years.

What makes you say that?

Yeah, did Wheels of Zeus do anything? What did Woz do at Fusion io and Primary Data? It sounds like he's been renting out his name to various small companies.

I wonder if his plane crash and the resulting head trauma is the reason why.

I've thought about this basic business idea a lot. And there are businesses that already exist using this model, using dollars. The problem you run into is the transaction costs and overhead. The savings are a long tail distribution situation. So the current providers only target very large clients. There are tons of smaller opportunities that on paper have a great rate of return, but it is hard to get the overhead and transaction cost low enough to make the numbers work. Look at this structure as a way to lower the transaction costs and overhead of attacking this market. I'm excited they are trying.

"transaction costs" have nothing to do with it. All they are using the blockchain for is to store meter readings, the blockchain is significantly more expensive than the standard method: a regular-ass database.

It's yet another example of the misconception that blockchain somehow guarantees data validity. In reality it does the opposite: it reduces tampering, sure, but there are other ways to reduce tampering that don't also forbid validation. A broken meter will put bad data on the blockchain just the same as it will any other database, but because you're using blockchain you now can't go back and fix it when you find the error.

I was thinking about on boarding investors, on boarding clients, generating reports for this investors, collecting payments, etc. I think the meter data is of the least importance here. I've worked with huge amounts of remote metering applications that have significantly more dollars at stake. The industries that use them already have standards in place for how to deal with measurement problems.

If you are right then I'd hope you'd start an efficiency as a service company that covers upgrade costs up front and collects payments over time. There is a huge lack of providers in the space that are a few thousand dollar or less upgrades with payouts over about two years. You can see the challenge, you have to spend less than a few hundred dollars in overhead/transactions over a multi year relationship!

The vast majority of companies in this space are targeting large facilities with multi million dollar upgrades, because it is hard to make the numbers work otherwise.

I concur with your point, considering we already have methods like hashing to create rather unique signatures, and with frameworks and regulations(laws). I'm going to vaguely quote James Mickens here, but you can basically sue someone if there is an issue. If there is an issue on the block chain? You need to fork it. Oh, and the talk for anyone who's interested considering he conveys a few interesting points I've seen throughout this thread. https://youtu.be/15RTC22Z2xI

You can always write 'correction meter reading should have been ...' on the chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com