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

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.

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Google is turning into yet another big corporation by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  2. It's better than the opposite by Ecuador · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

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    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  3. A solution in search of a problem? by Phaid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:A solution in search of a problem? by CalcuttaWala · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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, safer and easier to implement solution.

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  4. Re:When was Google ever at the bleeding edge? by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Meh! Get back to me when they allow you to use regular expressions.

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    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."