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Sergey Brin Says Google 'Failed To Be on the Bleeding Edge' of Blockchain (cnbc.com) 133

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
At an event over the weekend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that the internet giant missed its chance to be at the forefront of blockchain technology. From a report: Brin, who currently serves as president of Google parent company Alphabet, joined blockchain technology leaders and researchers on a panel at Richard Branson's exclusive Blockchain Summit. "We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I'll be honest," Brin said. Although Google may have missed out on early adoption of the distributed ledger technology, Brin suggested that blockchain is within the wheelhouse of X, the company's semi-secret research division. "I see the future as taking these kind of research-y kind of out there ideas and making them real -- and Google X is kind of like that," Brin said.
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Sergey Brin Says Google 'Failed To Be on the Bleeding Edge' of Blockchain More

Sergey Brin Says Google 'Failed To Be on the Bleeding Edge' of Blockchain

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  • Google is turning into yet another big corporation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @11:50AM (#56917568)

    Google was innovative when it was growing. Now, it's a huge conglomerate (or rather, Alphabet, it's parent, is). They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.

    Yes, that doesn't by accident sound like Microsoft. That's how big tech corporations work. Sergey, sorry to tell you, but Google has become too big to innovate. Innovation takes flexibility and the ability to risk something, both features large corporations lack.

    • Re:Google is turning into yet another big corporat (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:07PM (#56917690)

      They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.

      And that's new how?

      Android? Bought
      Google Maps? Bought
      Blogger? Bought
      AdSense/Adwords? Bought
      Picasa? Bought
      Google Analytics? Bought
      Google Docs? Bought
      Youtube? Bought

      The list goes on and on...

      • They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.

        And that's new how?

        Android? Bought.

        Kinda like what Opportunist wrote, eh?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          No, because Google has been acquiring companies for products since 2001. Their claim is this is something new when it is not.

          • No, because Google has been acquiring companies for products since 2001. Their claim is this is something new when it is not.

            Innovation and acquisition are not mutually exclusive

      • I'm no (longer a) fan of Google, but I'd disagree with a few of those inclusions. Sure, they may have bought them, but they don't serve to prove that Google doesn't innovate.

        For instance, the Google Maps project may have been jumpstarted via an acquisition, but the thing they bought was a desktop application written in C++. Google Maps itself was actually highly innovative and influential when it launched, but not for any of the reasons that made the acquired product what it was.

        You might recall that prior

    • This.

      In the cases of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc., the owners sold the companies to public investors.

      Shareholders don't give one good goddam rat's ass about anything except revenue.

      When I worked at Mobil Oil years ago, I asked a new hire, "What business are we in?"

      She said, "Selling hydrocarbon-based products."

      I said, "Wrong! We are in the business of selling stocks."

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      What is supposed to be new about Google acquiring companies for products/services?

      https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki... [en.wikipedia.org]

    • This a joke? Never heard of Adwords, AdSense, Google Maps, Youtube or Android? All acquisitions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Google never innovated. From day one they improved what others had developed, but they always stayed away from the bleeding edge and waited for other companies to really try things out first.

  • It's better than the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @11:51AM (#56917588) Homepage

    It's better than the opposite: applying blockchains to anything you can think of, like most companies are doing currently, when it is only suited for very specific and limited tasks...

    • Blockchain is useful as a database when you don't trust anyone to keep the database, and it's ok if the information is public (so even though I don't trust my bank with my social security number, they still have it).

      There are not very many use cases where that is applicable.
  • Now we got fields of rotting tulips.
  • Google should let others bleed first to develop the technology, come out with their own version and then claim that they invented it first.

  • Blockchain and electricity consumption (Score:3)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:00PM (#56917652)

    Is there any blockchain system that is not the absolute electricity hog that is Bitcoin? Modern cash registers and credit card swipe machines use a trivial amount of electricity. The world cannot afford to dump a substantial fraction of its available power into bitcoin-type computations.

    • We need more safe clean power, not people complaining about useful new technology that consumes power.

      People had the same bleats about aluminum processing back when the Bessemer process got going. Nobody needs airplanes!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sphealey ( 2855 )

        Bessemer process is used to make steel. It replaced the open hearth process and both makes higher quality steel and is more efficient in energy and pollution than open hearth.

        Manufacturing of aluminum always required electricity - there is fundamentally no other way known to do it so the cost is acceptable. Particularly given the recycleability of the material once refined. There are many other more efficient ways to process cash transactions than Bitcoin, so no need to use the energy hog.

    • Yes. Bitcoin uses Proof-Of-Work as a consensus algorithm. You can use any consensus algorithm that you want. For example, a more fancy round robin (with Byzantine Fault Tolerance) or Proof-Of-Elapsed-Time. Or you could just simplify the Proof-Of-Work to be easier to solve.

  • A solution in search of a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phaid ( 938 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:08PM (#56917696) Homepage

    I see a lot of people hyping blockchain technology for non-cryptocurrency uses, but I have yet to see an application to which it is better suited than current transaction systems. I understand that a distributed ledger potentially lets you do away with things like reconciliation transactions. But there are some downsides with that: every participant has to keep a full copy of the ledger, and participants still have to use double entry accounting, which means essentially keeping two sets of books. And while the ledger itself may be secure and tamper-proof, there still has to be some way to turn entries into actionable financial transactions, which requires another system that can itself be compromised (e.g. the Bitcoin exchanges that have experienced some famous security breaches).

    Maybe I'm just not looking at it right?

    • participants still have to use double entry accounting, which means essentially keeping two sets of books.

      No it doesn't.

      Unless you're Greek.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I see a lot of people hyping blockchain technology for non-cryptocurrency uses, but I have yet to see an application to which it is better suited than current transaction systems. I understand that a distributed ledger potentially lets you do away with things like reconciliation transactions. But there are some downsides with that: every participant has to keep a full copy of the ledger, and participants still have to use double entry accounting, which means essentially keeping two sets of books.

      From a transactional database perspective, the chain removes some validation overhead you'd otherwise need to implement everytime. Double entry is a form of that validation.

      And while the ledger itself may be secure and tamper-proof, there still has to be some way to turn entries into actionable financial transactions, which requires another system that can itself be compromised (e.g. the Bitcoin exchanges that have experienced some famous security breaches).

      Maybe I'm just not looking at it right?

      That is the crux of money not properly backed by real world assets. Diamonds, Gold, oil, etc. It's all electronic now but wasn't before, there is no gold changing hands nor diamonds. The physical assets sit in vaults, there's nothing to stop a country from lieing about their reserves either esentially allowing them to print paper b

      • there's nothing to stop a country from lieing about their reserves either esentially allowing them to print paper bills.

        What have reserves got to do with it? It's the productive power of the issuing state's economy that matters and if that's out of alignment with the [nominal] money supply the markets will figure it out pretty quickly. Isn't that right, Zimbabwe?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The ledger isn't tamper proof. You can do whatever you want, so long as you can meet the requirements to validate it.

      For bitcoin that means you need to convince half the computational power to agree with you. For a proof of stake system it means you need to convince half the (weighted) shareholders. For a private system, guess who's probably got override and veto powers to do whatever they want?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        For a private system, guess who's probably got override and veto powers to do whatever they want?

        Exactly. You can either tie your system to a public blockchain like Bitcoin's and experience all the delay and computational requirements that brings, or you can host it yourself at which point it's really just another database.

    • And while the ledger itself may be secure and tamper-proof...

      It's neither of those things. Anyone controlling over half the computing power on the chain can do whatever the hell they want to do to it. It would just take a lot more electricity than doing the exact same thing with a relational database.

      Blockchain is today's snake-oil.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CalcuttaWala ( 765227 )
      A distributed block-chain database is superior to a centralised SQL or NoSQL database if and only if there is NO centralised authority that is trusted by all participants. A blockchain solution should be attempted only when there is non-heirarchical network of peers who cannot, or will not trust each other. Cryptocurrency -- or equivalents that allow one to store, exchange unit economic value -- are most amenable for a blockchain application. For everything else a good old fashioned RDBMS is cleaner, faster

  • Kind of contradictory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Monday July 09, 2018 @12:10PM (#56917714) Homepage

    Google's motus operandi is about amassing piles of stuff :
    getting (initially) a huge index of the web,
    piling large collection of data to train their IA (training voice recognition from their snippets of google voice),
    piling large amount of private personal to better target ads,
    etc.

    Whereas, the whole key purpose behind all *distributed* ledger systems is to remove the needs of a central authority.

    Google and blockchain are on the exact polar opposite of the decentralization scale.

    • Google's motus operandi is about amassing piles of stuff

      What's that supposed to mean? Small dot of working? Something about a three-armed alien?

  • Even with search, they were late, with a pretty bad search engine that just managed to be the biggest one after a while.

    • Back when I started (in the dial-up days, onion on belt etc) AltaVista were best. All of a suddent and for no discernible reason they went shite. Google were in the right place to recover the fumble.

      • Back when I started (in the dial-up days, onion on belt etc) AltaVista were best. All of a suddent and for no discernible reason they went shite. Google were in the right place to recover the fumble.

        Excite was my search engine of choice in the dark days before Google. As much as I love to bash google, they vastly improved on anything that came before them and even to this day, there is no search engine that is better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Same here. No idea what killed the excellent AltaVista though. Probably management stupidity.

    • I'm old enough to know within 2 years they were superior to all competition, and no internet-facing search engine is better.

      Please don't reply if you're part of unwashed masses who only types in words and doesn't know how to refine google searches with operators and prefixes

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by StevisF ( 218566 )

      Search engines were a disaster in the late 90s and early 2000s when Google rose to prominence. They weren't very clever, indexed only a subset of the Internet (when it was tiny by today's standards), and were full of spam links because their algorithms were easily gamed. Look up PageRank. It was a big deal.

  • there are other ways to verify and sign records in a normal distributed database, the blockchain ledger system are constipated and bottlenecked, "poor scalabliity" and why transactions take so long.

    google doesn't need such a thing, most businesses don't need such a thing.

    blockchain is mostly a fad outside of crypto currency where it's a bottleneck

  • When you look at it from an historical perspective, blockchain technology is merely a passing phase, to be replaced by less power-intensive methods that provide similar results.

    It's kind of like the Stirling Engine, which was a thing for a while until we realized there were better ways to do things.

    Blockchain will also be replaced. Think of it as early ECMAscript, or other coding languages, that have for the most part already been replaced.

  • What company thrives on blockchain today? We see many announcements, but successful business cases are scarce.

    • What company thrives on blockchain today?

      Advertising, PR and marketing companies, I imagine.

  • If Google puts a small team together of some capable engineers it would maybe take them 6 months to have a nice open source package to handle blockchain and distributed ledger technology.
    If they're not into the distributed ledger technology yet it means they don't care about it. As if no one at Google isn't aware of it :-)

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