Brin Feels Google Missed Its Shot At Blockchain

By Sumedha Bose

BTC Wires: Very few people are able to own up to the mistakes that they have made. Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, is one of them. At a recent blockchain conference in Morocco, he confessed that his company has probably missed its chance to be at the forefront of blockchain technology. “We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I’ll be honest,” Brin said.

The statement was made on a panel at Richard Branson’s exclusive Blockchain Summit. He was joined by blockchain technology leaders and researchers. Brin currently serves as president of Google parent company Alphabet.

They might have missed their shot, but all is not lost yet. Brin suggested that the company’s semi-secret research division, X, might be working on something at the moment. “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.

Brin admitted on the panel that he doesn’t know “a whole lot about cryptocurrency,” but his interest was piqued by an amateur mining rig set-up with his son.

“A year or two ago my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC,” Brin said. “I told him If we get a gaming PC we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we got an ethereum miner on there and we’ve been making a few pennies and dollars since.” This is a high profile example of the already existing trend of gamers mining crypto.

Brin said, “that definitely got me interested and I started to study the technology behind it and found it to be fascinating.”