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Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
- mupuff1234 5y agoIt's gonna be hard to deprecate a public blockchain, but if someone can do it it's Google!
- acdha 5y agoBlockchains 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rodiger 5y agoYou don't need much infra because of how difficulty adjustments work... consistently less hashpower -> it becomes easier to mine
- acdha 5y agoYou’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.
- thebean11 5y agoThe 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.
- acdha 5y agoThat'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.
- thebean11 5y agoDo you mean people running the infrastructure? Or developing the software? We don't have to speculate on either. The infrastructure / nodes are paid for by some combination of inflation (block rewards) and transaction fees, depending on the network. The software is pretty similar to any other open source software. There are open source devs who will contribute for free, companies who will give grants for features they have a vested interest in (or will pay their own engineers to develop them directly), and organizations with funding to pay engineers. Again, we don't have to speculate. We don't even know who the founder of Bitcoin is and it's still under active development. In case you're interested, the mailing list is a great way to see what's happening in Bitcoin development: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/ https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/ For Ethereum: https://ethereum-magicians.org/ https://ethereum-magicians.org/
- acdha 5y agoI'm aware but that wouldn't apply if Google launched a blockchain, which was the origin of this thread, and it wouldn't help with the details I listed where key parts of the system are not stored on the blockchain. If Google introduced, say, oracles which their smart contracts relied on you'd need a way to provide a new service and permission to update those contracts (this is, of course, a massive risk for fraud so that can't be done lightly). Similarly, even if they used someone else's chain like Ethereum, if the data stored on the chain references something like a CDN endpoint where the real payload is available, the fact that the blockchain itself is still running wouldn't help you much if you didn't have a compatible alternative with a copy of the data.
- hartator 5y agoAnd just before, they will try to inject ads in the blockchain.
- hanniabu 5y ago"You must watch this ad to recieve your block reward or send a transaction"
- smitty1110 5y agoAnd do three captchas to view your wallet.
- Nextgrid 5y ago"Mining" this Google blockchain would be offices full of people solving captchas all day long.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y agoNah, they'll make a hybrid of captcha and ads so that they can get companies to pay them for the captcha content.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoAzure already did that 6 months ago: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/06/microsoft-drops-azure-blockchain/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/06/microsoft-drops-azure-blo...
- jagger27 5y agoIt's extremely simple if no one uses it!
- Proven 5y agoHN (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.
- tyingq 5y ago>What value can they possibly add? 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.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoGoogle 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.
- notreallyserio 5y agoGoogle is a 2 trillion market cap company with a lot of N billion dollar products, it's not that outlandish.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoThey weren't meant to be N billion dollar products.
- tyingq 5y agoNot 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.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- netcan 5y agoWhatever 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.
- suprfsat 5y agoAh yes, Google Wallet, I mean Pay, is nothing if not "orderly" and "accountable".
- Kon-Peki 5y agoAccording 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807
- axg11 5y agoHow 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.
- JofArnold 5y ago~Gmail: acquisition~ EDIT: nope, I remembered wrong; PB did it while at Google. GSuite: a product of several acquisitions Android: acquisition YouTube: acquisition Nest: acquisition Sure, they may have improved them. But definitely not spawned from blooming flowers.
- Spivak 5y agoThis 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.
- spuz 5y agoGiven 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-price-manipulation/ https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966533
- mypastself 5y agoThe 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoMy first thought as well. 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)
- vmception 5y agoFinally 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.
- suprfsat 5y agoBit disingenuous to demand fiat currency to write smart contracts…
- vmception 5y agoBit self limiting to care. Liquidity is liquidity.
- IncRnd 5y agoPerhaps, 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?
- vmception 5y agoWhat 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. There are better jokes.
- manningthegoose 5y agoIt'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-cryptocurrency-start-ups.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/technology/silicon-valley...
- progbits 5y agoBut why keep them if they are going to be doing useless work? In the hopes they get bored and move internally to different project?
- uvdn7 5y agoIt’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.
- xnx 5y agoSometimes having someone do useless work for you is better than having them do useful work for a competitors.
- kaycebasques 5y agoIs GAMMA the new FAANG? * Google * Amazon * Microsoft * ??? * Apple
- agentultra 5y agoI 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).
- thebean11 5y agoWhy 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?
- agentultra 5y agoI 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.
- thebean11 5y agoBut how does Google getting in signal that?
- exdsq 5y agoThere's a bit more to it than Merkle trees though
- agentultra 5y agoYes, I'm being glib on purpose. I've read enough of the papers and proofs to be familiar with the underlying technology.
- dqpb 5y ago5 years from now: > Google tries to sunset Blockchain Unit, but can’t
- notreallyserio 5y ago> 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.
- dqpb 5y ago> people were using compute VMs to pay for the compute VMs Lol, genius. In other news, "Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing"
- JaimeThompson 5y agoI though that was a joke, sadly you aren't joking. https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb43x/shell-quest-carbon-capture-plant-alberta https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb43x/shell-quest-carbon-ca...
- sound1 5y agoOne of the best comments read on HN :-)
- throwaway4good 5y agoGoogle 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?
- tjpnz 5y agoGoogle 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.
- sangnoir 5y ago> 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? 1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-pay-hopes-to-recover-from-brutal-2021-with-new-leadership/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-pay-hopes-to-...
- dekhn 5y agoif correct, this means urs retired for real.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoThis 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.
- vanviegen 5y ago> The likes of IBM, SAP, etc. can hardly be accused of running pyramid schemes. No, their game is selling boatloads of senior consultancy hours. They hardly seem invested in blockchains themselves.
- secretsatan 5y agoDoes it? Can blockchain do transactions fast enough for an operation like google?
- logicallee 5y ago(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/ https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/ : "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. "
- timmg 5y agoInteresting 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.
- weedking 5y agoCould be worth mentioning here that Eric Schmidt recently became an advisor to a blockchain-adjacent project called Chainlink.
- xtracto 5y agoBut 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?
- lifeplusplus 5y agoCompanies dabble into many things to test the waters. If Blockchain had useful use it'd be here by now, 11 years is enough time
- mickotron 5y agoGoogle is already on the governing council of Hedera Hashgraph, as well as Boeing, EFTPOS, IBM, LG,and many others.