Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin made
the surprise revelation that he is an Ethereum (ETH) miner at the Blockchain Summit in Morocco
Sunday, July 8.
Brin is currently the president of Alphabet, Google’s
parent company which formed as part of the tech
giant’s restructuring back in 2015, but his “side hustle” is
apparently mining the world’s second largest cryptocurrency,
Ethereum, together with his 10-year old
son.
Brin attributed the success of Google’s search engine
and email services as down to taking the possibilities of emerging
technologies “seriously” - recognizing a potential “leap” -
something he credited the developers and minds behind the crypto
space as doing as well.
The Google billionaire went on to say that cryptocurrencies - which have spread public key
cryptography across the web and created consensus algorithms such
as proof-of-work (PoW) - are “mind-boggling.” The
crypto global network, taken seriously, is “extraordinary.”
Brin also highlighted the concept of zero-knowledge proofs that
underpin anonymity-oriented altcoins such as ZCash - the maths of which he conceded not quite being
able to follow - as again, “mind-boggling.”
"I see the future as taking these...research-y,
out-there ideas and making them real," he said.
In Alphabet’s Founders Letter in 2017, Brin
credited leading cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum as being a major
factor in today’s momentous “computing boom.”
Google, for its part, announced its cryptocurrency
advertisement ban in March, which came into effect June 1, and has
been heavily criticized. Brin
yesterday acknowledged that the company has “failed” to be on the
“bleeding-edge” when it comes to embracing crypto.
Ethereum (ETH) is ranked the second largest
cryptocurrency as of press time, with a market cap of around
$44.5 billion.