Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by sdenton4 on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @06:10PM (#19792525)

a) Opportunism is good business.

b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...

c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.

(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by nostrademons on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @06:25PM (#19792624)

Yeah, I totally agree that for the sort of problems that Google or Amazon faces, blockchains are a terrible solution. There are well-known best practices for scalable distributed computing, and blockchains are not them.

I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.

There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by tsimionescu on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:16PM (#19793327)

It's just so hard to imagine, at least in the current version of the world, a problem for which a distributed trust algorithm is the right solution, instead of a centralized one, probably state-owned if high levels of trust are needed. This is especially true given the advantages that a trusted authority has over blind consensus (e.g. the ability to revert fraudulent transactions).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by spookthesunset on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:16PM (#19793680)

> that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution

Name a single actual problem that is only solved by the blockchain.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by firebones on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @10:09PM (#19793920)

The forces of capitalism and most existing forms of government are anathema to decentralization (inherent in the crypto-blockchain premise). The idealism of decentralization exists only until it meets the overwhelming real world gravity of money. At which point blockchain tech and crypto could only thrive if carried out by hand-calculated hashes on paper transported by motorcycle and carrier pigeon.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors by lbfkbsjcn73 on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @05:50AM (#19795732)

> and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but assuming Amazon is a member of "FAANG": https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/. Does that count?

[ Parent | on HN ]