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?
Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
61–70 of 120 posts
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#62Whatever 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…
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.
~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.
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#63It's gonna be hard to deprecate a public blockchain, but if someone can do it it's Google!
Azure already did that 6 months ago: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/06/microsoft-drops-azure-blo...
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#64if correct, this means urs retired for real.
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#65Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#66Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#67It'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…
> It doesn’t make sense that Google would keep people around, pay them a lot of money, have them produce useless projects
It might. This keeps these people out of the job market.
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#68Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#69Earlier 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…
Major blockchains are by definition the survivors at this point, but a great many have already bit the dust. In the end the single point of failure is always going to be the value of the coin on the open market, 100% of 0$ doesn’t pay server costs.
Re: Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'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…
Yeah maybe, I'm really having trouble imagining what Google could be building here so can't say either way.