Google Labs Launches Blockchain Division

Here’s a fun new report from Bloomberg: Google is forming a blockchain division. The news follows yesterday’s Bloomberg report, which quoted Google’s president of commerce as saying, “Cryptocurrency is something we’re very focused on.”Web3 seems to be becoming something special at Google.

Just like “algorithms,” “AI,” and “5G,” “blockchain” is often used as a buzzword for rogue tech executives hoping to hype investors or consumers. Blockchain is just a distributed P2P database, as if BitTorrent hosted the database instead of pirated movies and Linux ISOs. The database is divided into blocks, and each new block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, forming a chain of records that protect each other from changes.

In a traditional database, transactions are verified by the database owner, but in a blockchain, no one owns the database, so each transaction needs to be verified on many computers. This is a big disadvantage of blockchains: constantly verifying all transactions requires a huge amount of electricity and computing power.

Not much is known about the group, except that it is engaged in “blockchain and other next-generation distributed computing and storage technologies.”Google’s rise to the web giant has made it a pioneer in distributed computing and database development, so perhaps it could make some noise in that area as well.