Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’
blockworks.coGiven 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
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.
My 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)
> Rumors like this seem to come in droves whenever Bitcoin prices tumble.
Any evidence you can point us to?
Thanks - I saw that on the FP recently but didn't get a chance to read it.
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 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!
> 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.
This is silly. There are many, many true believers.
That's just a comment to yourself without many commenters in it.
/S?
It links to this course syllabus from the top algorithmic game theorist in the world:
https://timroughgarden.github.io/fob21/l/l1.pdf
I doubt roughgarden is excited about blockchains just because he has some tokens
Not exactly.
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.
But why keep them if they are going to be doing useless work? In the hopes they get bored and move internally to different project?
Sometimes having someone do useless work for you is better than having them do useful work for a competitors.
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.
Is GAMMA the new FAANG?
* Google
* Amazon
* Microsoft
* ???
* Apple
Facebook is now Meta, so the acronyms have to change.
So MAANG. Add in Oracle at the end and you've got yourself a MAANGO!
Oh cmon, MANGA is so much better
Or maybe we just need a new company beginning with an F?
I vote for Foot Locker
All Foot Locker has to do is start selling exclusive NFTs with their shoes, and they'll be considered an innovative blockchain company in no time.
Fugazzi MAMMA
Google is Alphabet tho, so its MAAMA or MAMAA.
MAMAA is by far my favorite, it sounds like a child crying out to mom. Mamaa! (also easy to add another m or a if ever needed - mammaaaaaa!)
Pop Netflix back in there from the FAANG, and you have MAMANA
It's MAAAM!
Or TAAAMM. Companies with hug TAMs.
Meta
And actually Google is now Alphabet, so it would be one of:
AAAMM
MAMAA
AMAMA
etc
Meta?
N is for Netflix. Microsoft is hardly relevant.
Yeah the 2.25T company is less relevant than a movie and TV studio that is worth 1/12th as much. /s
Haha... that was a good one, you ALMOST got me there :-)
2 trillion dollar company hardly relevant
By this "logic" FAANG should contain Saudi Aramco and probably Tesla: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
Instead, the name was always related to high growth + high salaries + innovative technonogy + interesting companies to be working for.
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.
> 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.
Does it? Can blockchain do transactions fast enough for an operation like google?
Nowadays IBM is famous for hyping, isn't it?
(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/ : "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. "
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 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?
1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-pay-hopes-to-...
Could be worth mentioning here that Eric Schmidt recently became an advisor to a blockchain-adjacent project called Chainlink.
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?
Companies dabble into many things to test the waters. If Blockchain had useful use it'd be here by now, 11 years is enough time
5 years from now:
> Google tries to sunset Blockchain Unit, but can’t
> 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.
> 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"
I though that was a joke, sadly you aren't joking.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb43x/shell-quest-carbon-ca...
One of the best comments read on HN :-)
Google is already on the governing council of Hedera Hashgraph, as well as Boeing, EFTPOS, IBM, LG,and many others.
if correct, this means urs retired for real.
It'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...
And just before, they will try to inject ads in the blockchain.
"You must watch this ad to recieve your block reward or send a transaction"
And do three captchas to view your wallet.
"Mining" this Google blockchain would be offices full of people solving captchas all day long.
Nah, they'll make a hybrid of captcha and ads so that they can get companies to pay them for the captcha content.
It's extremely simple if no one uses it!
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 don't need much infra because of how difficulty adjustments work... consistently less hashpower -> it becomes easier to mine
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.
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 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/
For Ethereum: https://ethereum-magicians.org/
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 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.
Yeah maybe, I'm really having trouble imagining what Google could be building here so can't say either way.
Yeah, I would definitely not want to say anything other than “it depends” until details emerge. This isn't even an official announcement yet so anyone who knows presumably is under legal constraints not to say anything.
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.
Sure but it's not exactly random which chains went to zero. BTC isn't going to hit $0 due to chance, not sure if that's what you're implying.
By the same token, BTC or other coin hitting zero is not just a question of chance. Suppose BTC had a large dip in value and a similar drop in mining. What are the odds people would focus on repeated double spend attacks for the lulz thus dropping the value to zero?
I am not saying that’s likely today, but rather that it’s easy to over estimate resilience in the case of black swan events.
No need to speculate, look at the price and hash rate charts in 2017. The more recent hashrate drop was even bigger. Still no successful attacks.
There's a disincentive for people with mining power to attack the network (assuming they even have enough). It makes their hardware worth less so I can't imagine anyone doing it for kicks.
Agree though that something similar to what you're saying is what Bitcoin hitting $0 would look like. Certainly not impossible but I think it's extremely difficult attack. Even more so now than in 2017.
Yea, I think that’s more a risk of dropping the last 1% in value rather than a significant risk to current prices.
The real issue for current owners is Crypto seems to have lost it’s grip on the popular imagination. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin What happens from here is likely a question of utility rather than speculation.
Try "web3", "smart contract", or "NFT" though. I think there's a shift from focusing on the protocols themselves to stuff built on top.
HN (2024): Google cancels Blockchain services
I can't think of any blockchain (apart from government blockchains) that I'd avoid as much as Google's.
>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.
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).
Ahh, I see. I don't personally see what the big market is for anything blockchain related, so I went with one thing that seems reasonable.
yeah, it's a good question.... it could be as much for marketing/recruiting hype as anything?
Google is a 2 trillion market cap company with a lot of N billion dollar products, it's not that outlandish.
They weren't meant to be N billion dollar products.
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.
But how does Google getting in signal that?
There's a bit more to it than Merkle trees though
Yes, I'm being glib on purpose. I've read enough of the papers and proofs to be familiar with the underlying technology.
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."
~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.
> Gmail: acquisition
Wasn't Gmail someone's 20%-time project, within Google?
You're right! PB! I'll correct
Ah yes, Google Wallet, I mean Pay, is nothing if not "orderly" and "accountable".
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.
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 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.
Bit disingenuous to demand fiat currency to write smart contracts…
Bit self limiting to care. Liquidity is liquidity.
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.
There are better jokes.
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.
Yeah I’m aware!
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.