Google once considered issuing currency - Eric Schmidt | Hacker News Reader

Google once considered issuing currency - Eric Schmidt

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56 pointsjitendra_29 comments

Interestingly, the relative weakness of reserve currencies has made this plausible in a real way. As the debt risk of countries becomes closer to the strongest multinationals it creates the possibility for the debt of multinationals to be lower risk than any currency it can be denominated in, which happened briefly a couple years ago for the first time ever. In effect, the debt instruments are currency.

Right now, governments have the ability to inflate their currencies to pay for their excessive spending. If non-governmental instruments become stronger than reserve currencies then it will create a novel situation where they can't inflate away the debt even if every other government is doing it. That is new territory. Companies that generate and preserve value on a global basis will have financial instruments that are de facto currencies, much in the way gold is.

That would be an interesting time.

National currencies are legal tender in the issuing nation (or in EU Euro states, in case of the Euro), while everything else isn't. This makes a lot of difference.

Companies do have "currencies" that can hold value independent of FX - secured bonds. Otherwise, commodities take the role of liquid non-fiat value holders. Substituting a government-backed currency with a corporate-backed one is a terrible idea given that a corporate is subjugated to a sovereign (and pays its debt in sovereign currency [ignoring the marginal role in-kind bond payments play]). Thus, one is accepting an inherently inferior proposition.

It should be noted, though, that many multinationals' bonds trade healthier than many sovereigns' currencies.

Er, bonds are denominated in currencies. There is no independent value.

One can just as easily say that currencies are denominated in assets. When valuing a currency one inevitably resorts to trade flow and capital production statistics. A better way to think of these flows is as swaps instead of "buying" things with money.

In the modern banking system Treasury bonds function just as much as money as Federal Reserve notes (which are technically a debt). Before the crisis AAA corporate bonds were accepted as collateral nearly on par with Treasury bonds.

The above is why this only applies to truly global multinationals that have their assets liberally distributed around the world. The risk exposure of a single government going rogue is mitigated by any particular government only having access to a fraction of the assets. If several governments go rogue at once then you have bigger problems to worry about.

True - I just assumed multinationals given that the discussion is on sponsoring units of account to compete with sovereign currencies. I should have been clearer about that.

I believe under either Solvency II or Basel III regulations, a corporation can't have a higher credit rating than its sovereign (e.g. whose currency its debt is issued in). But nevertheless, you are correct - it can have a better rating than sovereigns other than its own. Would you rather be holding BMW or Greek bonds right now, tho' they are both denominated in Euros.

How is that debt denominated in non-national-currency? In shares of stock?

> The idea was to implement a "peer-to-peer money" system.

Wow. I wonder if it literally means they were thinking of duplicating the (world's first) digital peer-to-peer currency: http://www.bitcoin.org Or is Schmidt using the term "peer-to-peer" liberally?

Edit: looks like I am right, a CNN article specifically mentions Bitcoin: http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/28/technology/google_future_of_...

The article says the statement was in response to audience questions, so this may have been in planning before Bitcoin was even released in 2009 (for all we know, Satoshi Nakamoto could be a Google employee who decided to take up the project personally). Not saying this is the case (obviously I don't have any proof either way), and I'm not personally that fond of Google, but Google may not entirely be at fault here.

I was following along for theverge's live blog of his keynote, i got the impression that this was a pre-bitcoin notion and it was dropped because they predicted most of the problems bitcoin is currently experiencing.

To me, the much more interesting part of his speech was that he seemed very in favor of overthrowing governments who restrict Internet access.

I may be reading too much into things on both of these points.

I lived on a hippy commune from 1974 to 1979 - we had our own currency then, called 'trash' in which we could buy anything we wanted. It was a peer-to-peer currency which was printed on the packs of cigarettes.

When I was 4 years old, I bought my first vehicle with Trash, a golf cart which I drove around the property.

Bit-coin may be digital, but it is not the first peer-to-peer currency.

We also had our own TV station, which was powered by the very first Apple computers. This is where I encountered Apple first...

How is the hippy currency peer-to-peer? Isn't it just like any other fiat currency?

I edited my post to clarify: first digital p2p currency.

Really interesting - is there anywhere documenting this commune or the currency - I'd love to read more about it, or just your personal experiences.

> I wonder if it literally means they were thinking of duplicating the (world's first) digital peer-to-peer currency: http://www.bitcoin.org

I think you forgot about digicash's product 'ecash'.

Claiming a 'first' in any field is difficult, to claim a 'first' in payment systems is a very tricky affair.

It may be that bitcoin is the first practical digital peer-to-peer currency but even that is up to interpretation, no doubt someone had something they launched that failed before it and plenty of people would disagree that it is practical as it is implemented today.

ecash was not truly peer-to-peer. On the contrary, the concept relied crucially on centralization as ecash would have been withdrawn from existing banks & credit card companies: http://web.archive.org/web/19970111163957/http://www.digicas...

In fact, bit gold, RPOW, and b-money (from respectively Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and Wei Dai) were the only similar ideas predating Bitcoin, but none of them were ever implemented... Which is why one can say that Bitcoin truly is the first implementation of a digital p2p currency, where everything, including the issuance of money, is decentralized.

Here is a google books link documenting ecash's peer-to-peer capabilities:

http://books.google.nl/books?id=4TJtnkaWpp0C&pg=PA115...

You could use your bank to host the software, but it was also possible to run your own.

Ecash was very much ahead of the curve at the time and it had features that we can only dream of today.

I do understand that the transfers were peer-to-peer. I could hand you eCash in an offline way, from my device to yours, as if I was handing you a bill, without going through a bank/clearing house network to authorize and validate the transfer.

But the issuance of eCash was still done by the bank. This is what makes eCash not 100% decentralized... I would compare eCash to the "pseudo p2p" Napster file sharing network which still relied on a central server (gasp!) to index the files, which allowed authorities to shut down the "p2p" network by closing down that central server.

"Real" cash is also issued centrally but nobody doubts that it can be used in a 'peer to peer' fashion for payments.

Anyway, I think we're well into 'no true Scotsman' territory here.

Real cash isn't peer to peer, is the point. Anyone can create bitcoin, without going to a bank. You can prefer a different term to p2p if you like, but parent's point was about the complete decentralization, not the word "p2p".

Although not itself a currency, Mondex provided peer-to-peer cash transfers in the mid 90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

As far as I recall, you could various devices to transfer cash from one card to another - including over telephone lines, but I think it died before anyone thought of doing Mondex over the Internet.

I was part of the trial in Exeter from 96-99. This was only sort of p2p, it was used basically as a method of carrying "cash" without notes or coins. Everything still went through the central bank (Natwest I believe ran it?) That including records of every transaction.

We used to share an office with a company doing Mondex development - there certainly were devices produced (e.g. based on the Philips P100 'screenphone') that could do peer-to-peer transfers, don't know if that functionality ever went live though.

NB The P100 was an ADSI "desktop" phone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Display_Services_Interfa...

Edit: I'm pretty sure I remember them having two P100s in a test environment sending cash back and foreward between them - presumably to ensure that no money was magically created or lost.

What are you trying to say? It's not like Google invented the concept of a search engine either. I always use that example to explain to people that it is not about the idea, but about execution.

I imply nothing negative. I am simply saying it is a significant endorsement of the concept of Bitcoin, when Larry and Sergei look at it and think "maybe we should do something similar".

Maybe Satoshi is a Google pseudonym. Nobody really knows where Bitcoin came from...

The U.S. government takes extreme interest in all alternative currency schemes. Google "e-gold" for more information. There are two areas of human experience all governments consider their own domain: the use of force and the creation of currency.

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