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.
The first thing that came to mind when I started reading the article. Not saying the information is false, but there is very good reason to take these types of bullish FAANG-related crypto news with a grain of salt.
Rumors like this seem to come in droves whenever Bitcoin prices tumble.
I can believe that Google hired a distributed technologies lead somewhere. Spinning it as blockchain/crypto seems to be the work of journalists trying to make it sound more interesting to the average viewer (more clicks)
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.
Doesn't really make sense. People leave for cryptocurrency projects because they’re promised a huge portion of the tokens or pre-mined coins. The idea is that they just need to make the project work well enough to hype enough people into buying the coins, at which point they can unload them at huge returns and then move on to the next crypto project to repeat the process.
It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects without the same asymmetric upside potential, all to keep them from going to companies that weren’t even competitors in the first place.
I'm all for a huge premine and short vesting period, but Google is competing with Meta.
Google is Web 2.0 "get off my lawn" Mecca, they ignored this space until Meta.
People go there because they just caught on to the compensation packages and are going to catch on to Web3 compensation packages just as late. They already work on overly complicated stacks for useless cogs on useless products that Google shuts down randomly.
Have you seen what "backend" competency entails these days? Its absurd!
You mentioned that there are true believers, so i thought you referred to the commenters on the topic, since you linked to the HN topic and not the pdf associated with that topic.
Which is a bit confusing tbh :p
Definitely since you both submitted it, have the top comment on it and I don't know him.
It’s not entirely useless. It costs big companies little to make this type of investments to avoid a potential big miss longer term (think of IBM, Nokia, etc.) Big companies are paranoid about missing the next big thing, so it makes sense to invest in a lot of things.
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 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.
Google already has considerable experience with payments and related compliance matters (specifically KYC and AML). Facebook not so much and I got the sense that they thought they might try to ignore those issues. It didn't work out too well for them.
> Google already has considerable experience with payments and related compliance matters
Google is on its 3rd payments iteration now, and the division had a large leadership exodus when the 2nd iteration of Google Pay flopped[1]. How much institutional knowledge have they retained?
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?
> Google no longer accepts GoogleBucks for cloud compute services. The product didn't make sense, people were using compute VMs to pay for the compute VMs.
Blockchains are inefficient always-on distributed systems. If people stop paying to run all of that infrastructure, it's effectively dead even if someone else did make a copy unless they can afford to run a scaled down version — and with little demand, the ceiling for that is quite low.
You’re still talking a networked system which needs to be internet-accessible. Servers, bandwidth, storage, and operators are not free and that means someone has to see some value to running them.
The point is that the rewards are elastic. If less people run them, rewards increase, so more people run them again. Obviously the currency rewards are denominated in could hit $0, but that doesn't seem likely to most people at this point.
That's a distraction from the real problem: what value does someone get for keeping a blockchain running? If the founders of the project have walked away from it, how many volunteers are going to care to support an orphaned system at all rather than putting their resources into something they can get paid more for?
The usual answer would be to keep a pet project alive but that runs into the realities of blockchains: the technology is inefficient by design and that means that most of the real work and data happens off chain. Having a copy of the chain itself is likely of minimal value if the company hosting referenced data stops paying those bills, an oracle is no longer available, the client application stops being developed or is not released by its owner, etc.
This means that you can't say anything about the long-term survivability of the chain itself without saying what it's used for because that'll tell you both how many people care about it at all and how committed they'll be to continuing to maintain the chain and its clients.
Maybe something to squash, say, DocuSign? Not that you need a blockchain to do that, but I can see a Google or Apple DocuSign product growing fast because they own the mobile OSes.
Google is almost a 2 trillion market cap company. Docusign is 20 bill. If some exec inside Google suggested building a team to "squash docusign" they'd be... silly.. and recognized as such.
Not sure I understand this. Google, for example, routinely does acquisitions well under a $20B level to enter a new market. Apigee might be a good example.
Perhaps you meant too small to occupy the entire new "Blockchain Unit"? Perhaps, but I assume they would be working on several things rather than just one.
Sure, but the goal of the acquisition is to help/kickstart something worth significantly more than that. Apigee was rolled into google cloud - that's a space worth trillions.
Docusign has a big share of the e-signature market. The market itself just isn't very big (by google standards).
Well they can dump seemingly unlimited amount of dollars into it for the next few years and maybe make something cool or at least make Blockchain more mainstream. If they dump it after that, who cares?
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).
Why would this be a nail in the coffin? Google moving into a new space, though usually unsuccessful, hasn't signaled the end of the space itself has it?
I don't think it's signalling the end of the space, just the end of the hype train.
I think at best we'll see the space shrink back to reflect the value it brings to the market.
Personally my bet is that it brings negative value for most of the use-cases it's being sold for and that the contraction will be large but... completely gone? I doubt it.
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.
How can you honestly say the "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach failed? Google scraps a lot of products, but they still have many great products: Gmail/GSuite, Android, YouTube, GCP, Nest...
Each of those is a successful tech company in their own right.
>>Each of those is a successful tech company in their own right.
I disagree. None are another revenue stream. Android/YouTube/etc pull a low of weight for the AdWords business but (a) those were acquisitions and (b) they don't have a business model "in their own right."
According to page 40 of the survey linked in [1] two weeks ago, 4 times as many American teenagers write checks vs using Google Pay. Going all in on blockchain makes it into a less-bad joke than it already is.
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.
Perhaps, they were waiting for you to write your employment contract as a smart contract? Maybe they found it humorous that you wanted to be paid with state-backed currency?
What exactly do you think is happening here, that I went to these places with demands? I know what job roles are open and I know the compensation. I dont apply until they get more interesting, they are getting more interesting.
The pay might not be at FAANG levels but they're still not badly paid roles & tokens instead of stocks means your share allocation is liquid which is nice.
FWIW, I'm in Palo Alto working for an Eastern European startup and not starving which I imagine is unheard of in any other space.
[1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966533