Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’ (opens in new tab)

Given this is "according to an email viewed by Bloomberg News", I can't help but be reminded of the "An Anatomy of a Bitcoin Price Manipulation" article that was posted here recently.

[1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966533

It's possible that this project was created as a sort of L8+ engineer/manager retention program. There's been some reporting that high level execs have been leaving GAMMA companies for blockchain/crypto projects with high payout potential[1]. I wonder if Google is heading in this direction to toss these people a bone with the hopes they'll stay.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley...

This is less of a news event than it first appears. This is "large company wants to be seen working on cool stuff and hedge against the possibility of the the market turning into something and having to play catch-up."

Some mid level exec was like "why aren't we blockchain, customers are asking about out this blockchain thing" and here we are. You need to wait for the product announcements and then wait to see if those products drive 100M+ revenue before knowing if they have any kind of staying power.

Interesting to see this post the day after I saw that Twitter now allows NFT profile pics -- and the same day the prices for the major crypto "currencies" are taking a beating.

This makes actual sense for Google. From a technical point of view a block chain is a database with some interesting properties that are useful in some cases. Most major database companies are not really doing anything with this technology yet. And yet there are enough interesting applications and use cases out there that are not pyramid schemes, scams, or bullshit that you could argue that that is probably a mistake long term. So, why not put some R&D money into this?

People get side tracked by all the crypto eutopians and bullshitters out there and the emotional roller coaster that is the valuation of Bitcoin, which from a technical point of view was an interesting proof of concept (it works, and it seems really resilient against people trying to hack it). But it is also deeply flawed from a technical point of view. It doesn't scale very well. It's expensive to run (by design even). And it requires an amount of electricity energy that would be enough to run a few small countries. That makes using it for it's originally intended purpose, a non starter. Paying for stuff with Bitcoin is so ludicrously expensive and slow that doing so just stopped being a thing. Basically, paying for a cup of coffee with bitcoin would cost more than enough to pay for a nice coffee machine. That also makes it useless for banking. Transferring money is not cheap but cheaper than that.

But not bad for a V1 and it's kind of old news since there are lots of solutions to these challenges. A decentralized database that is tamper proof, scales, and runs efficiently would be just the kind of product people might want to use for all sorts of things. Which is why there are some serious companies looking at this stuff with increasing interest. The likes of IBM, SAP, etc. can hardly be accused of running pyramid schemes. It's not what drives them. But making money is. And when banks and other serious business are finding uses for current block chains, they smell money.

So Google getting involved with this stuff is probably not the worst idea they've had recently. Amazon provides managed blockchains as well in AWS. So does Microsoft. Technically, Google is a bit late to the party.

(This is not a sarcastic comment).

This is absolutely fantastic! Google is a $2.6 trillion company with more than 5 servers, which is the number of servers needed to support every user on Earth doing transactions all the time (7 billion users * 1 transaction = 7 billion transactions = 1 server, call it 5.) I really think they will be able to host a 60 gigabyte file and support 7 transactions per second without using the electricity of a small country - which is the status quo in blockhain.

I really hope they succeed. It's literally just integers in a database (if you count by the penny). I've hoped Google would do something like this for a long time, and a close second option would be for someone else to do the same thing simply riding on top of their shared spreadsheet infrastructure, like, oh hey by the way since this spreadsheet view easily scales to a billion users do you mind if we use it to save the planet?

As an added benefit I do believe the FBI or SEC could get some visibility on there so that their version doesn't end up a cesspool of fraud.

Go, Google! This is what you were born to do![1] I'm excited to see what they do with this.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/ : "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. "

Google would be in a situation similar to Facebook (with their Libra or whatever it is called now) if they embarked on a cryptocurrency project, no?

Could be worth mentioning here that Eric Schmidt recently became an advisor to a blockchain-adjacent project called Chainlink.

But but... HN has taught me that Crypto/Blockchain is a scam and that there is no real use whatsoever in Blockchain that cannot be solved by other existing technologies.

Why is Google betting on such a loser tech with no real future?

5 years from now:

> Google tries to sunset Blockchain Unit, but can’t

Google is already on the governing council of Hedera Hashgraph, as well as Boeing, EFTPOS, IBM, LG,and many others.

if correct, this means urs retired for real.

It's gonna be hard to deprecate a public blockchain, but if someone can do it it's Google!

    HN (2024): Google cancels Blockchain services

What value can they possibly add?

I can't think of any blockchain (apart from government blockchains) that I'd avoid as much as Google's.

I guess this means the hype has finally peaked? This seems like a late, reluctant adoption and a nail in the coffin for the tech (honestly, good riddance -- Merkle trees have their uses but sheesh).

Whatever is going on with the >$1trn club's ideas for cracking that next ceiling... it's all quite opaque.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom" failed, but at least we had a grasp of what's going on. It was a bet on the, now known to be false idea that the web economy would have horizontal breadth. Turned out that (a) ads had a lot of death and (b) Google didn't manage to create any alternative revenue streams worth noting.

Now they all seem to be eyeing off anything that looks like it has $trn potential. That's a pretty finite pool.

Crypto is wild and chaotic. If a handful of big companies take it over, it'll be more orderly and ostensibly accountable. Traditional finance is pretty ugly, and we won't miss Citibank, JPM and such but...

Goddamn these bigshots and their sense of title to the world. I hope they lose.

Finally

Too bad I dont know what theyre doing but Ive been really annoyed that I couldnt get FAANG compensation to write smart contracts, and thats the only kind of thing worth coding right now, from a purely market based perspective the market is saying write smart contracts and ideally get paid while learning/improving how to do so. Other Web2 organizations are not competitive in compensation. Bi-modal compensation paths.

Web3 organizations also have their own bi-modal pay scale, with Silicon Valley VC backed startups with pitiful startup compensation for unnecessary equity on one end, and higher base salary + token swinging organizations on the other end. Although there is an extremely high probability of the token compensation turning into annual million dollar compensation and the luxury of a much faster vesting period, its still not exactly on par with the guarantees of a FAANG compensation structure. Over the last 18 months it has gotten extremely close though!

But not good enough for me, since launching smart contracts individually is still way more lucrative but requires way more focus. Working for someone else doesn't require focus it just require showing up, while gaining public consensus and references on your skillset. so it would be nice to have all that downtime compensated but only if it was high enough.

If Google begins working on the right thing it’ll pull all the comp up.