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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.
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…
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.
Token vesting is fantastic and short! Months!
Early stage private companies being compared to FAANG compensation is a major market distortion!
Its basically base + bonus + 5-6 figures of equity/options and 6 figures of tokens at a prelaunch valuation!
Just need the base + total initial compensation package higher, and some of the formalities to match US tax circumstances.
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
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)
5 years from now: > Google tries to sunset Blockchain Unit, but can’t
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
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.
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...
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.
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…
Each of those is a successful tech company in their own right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
Do 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 the…
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.
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...
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…