Porsche introduces blockchain to cars (opens in new tab)

I wonder if they're just announcing this to see what it can do for their stock price. At the risk of saying something completely reductive, I feel like any technical person with a beginner's grasp of what blockchain technology can do is only going to say "but why", and the appeal here is going to be limited to speculators or people impressed by the social proof that blockchain is impressive to others.

> "Taking 1.6 seconds, the process of opening and closing the car via an app is up to six times faster than before. In addition, efficient cryptographic encryption takes place."

A remote car key. You've invented a remote car key.

So I read this and I can't tell what it actually does in the car.

Porsche has been playing with new ownership models recently, including a sort of membership club where a fixed monthly payment gets you access to any model.

So this blockchain-based entitlements thingumy could be seen as an attempt to put in a flexible technology to support more experimentation along those lines.

I'm so glad the sentiment has changed on this useless garbage. Why would anyone want to decentralize car security? Porsche could just unlock your car through a centralized app. Why does everyone need access to that?

Just in case, the previous mechanism wasn't that much safe:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/26/scientist...

The paper has been published only in 2016, with a few amendments to "hide" (maybe) the parts that could have led to replication by thiefs:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2971826/cybercrime-hac...

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...

Please note how the Authors only tested a few VW models, but Porsche and a number of other luxury car manufacturers used the same chip/mechanism so that itis very likely to be hackable in a similar way.

Blockchain all the things!

Well, I guess we officially know what this years buzzword technology that will be added to everything whether it makes sense or not is.

I suspect that blockchain will eventually serve as a peer to peer database. If you can make it secure and no one needs to put up the infrastructure to maintain then it's a boon for car makers. We have a long way to go but it has promise.

Porsche is starting so it seems like BS but it has potential as it develops.

I don't get how these logging and sending commands to a car use cases benefit in any way from a blockchain as opposed to just having a central server handle it.

If anything, having Porsche be responsible for the security of that system is a benefit. Not to mention the reduced overhead.

I am very interested in seeing how my assumptions are proved wrong.