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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to believe Google actually hop onto the blockchain bandwagon as well, given the father of the Internet and their Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf[1] famously said "No" to blockchain [2].

[1]: https://ai.google/research/people/author32412

[2]: https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1019987651301081089

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"Chief Internet Evangelist" sounds like a ceremonial position. When I was working at Google, I had no idea who this person was or their position.

It is a ceremonial position, but this guy kinda deserves it. He literally invented the Internet - not in the Al Gore sense, but as in the "co-designed the initial version of TCP/IP" sense.

I don't think he actually did much at Google besides being a big hiring/advocacy/PR draw, but Google's entire market wouldn't exist without him. His tech talks were pretty fascinating too, while I was there.

If you didn't know who Vint Cerf is, consider asking your old college program to spend less time being a FAANG feeder, and more time on a well-rounded CS engineering education.

I'm not sure this counts as "hopping onto the bandwagon", I see this more as "Come use GCP" and just another way to promote GCP.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM will all 'embrace' block-chain for the same reasons explained here...

https://medium.com/@qroshan/block-chain-solving-imaginary-pr...

"Service Providers like Amazon/IBM have nothing to lose to give ‘Block-chain-as-a-service’ for any one willing to fork their money for such things. They are happy to take your money. Just like a stock broker, the more you use their compute power to do utterly useless things the more profitable they are."

Did you just quote yourself? Is this a thinly veiled attempt at promoting your own blogposts?

Either way I don't know why your opinion on cryptocurrencies is so harshly negative. Of course it is currently hyped up and of course it doesn't solve all problems as a magic cure-all. BUT there are several real world use cases and dismissing them all just because some people are trying to get rich in the ecosystem isn't warranted.

Well, yeah, private blockchains are practically useless unless they are a consortium chain, but even then the usefulness is questionable. Public blockchains are an entirely different beast, and I kind of just dismiss people now when they claim that public blockchains like Ethereum are useless because it's quite clear that they haven't done enough research.

Indeed, public blockchains aren't useless, they're extremely useful for one specific thing: censorship resistance. Evading the law, that is.

Now, of course the law isn't always just, it sucks that most countries ban drugs, it sucks that governments don't want anti-government activists to get donations, but the terrible things done with buttcoins vastly outnumber the non-terrible things.

Cryptocurrencies have largely fueled the rise of ransomware, extortion and scams.

People are literally burning energy on hash bruteforcing just so that scammers and malware authors could get paid.

Going along the same lines as your argument - would you also agree iTunes gift cards are bad?

Google is such a large company, with so many different teams and goals, that it is hard to believe that the words of someone, even as high as the CEO, represent the practices of all the employees.

Good on Google to support ETH.

On the contrary, it would be hard to believe that they wouldn't support customers who want to run blockchain applications on Google Cloud.

Yes please, run your u̵s̵e̵l̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵e̵x̵p̵e̵n̵s̵i̵v̵e̵ ̵c̵o̵m̵p̵u̵t̵a̵t̵i̵o̵n̵a̵l̵l̵y̵ ̵i̵n̵t̵e̵n̵s̵i̵v̵e̵ ̵n̵o̵n̵s̵e̵n̵s̵e̵ cutting edge blockchain DAPP on our platform!

If they can find a way to make each cycle profitable, why not?

I found this fairly interesting:

> Below, we'll demonstrate how a specific smart contract platform (Ethereum) can interoperate with our enterprise cloud data warehouse (BigQuery) via oracle middleware (Chainlink).

Given that Google Cloud's recently hired new CEO is a former President from Oracle [1], I guess this is nothing more than a nod at Oracle to maintain on friendly terms?

Hard to imagine Google Cloud promoting an Oracle blockchain middleware 6 months ago..

[1] https://www.businessinsider.nl/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuria...

This oracle has nothing to do with Larry Ellison. From the article:

"If the data are not derived from recently added on-chain data, a trusted source of external data is required. Such a source is called an oracle."

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