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by jillesvangurp
1616 days ago
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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. |
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No, their game is selling boatloads of senior consultancy hours. They hardly seem invested in blockchains themselves.