Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who currently serves as president of the search engine’s parent company Alphabet, has recently revealed he’s a cryptocurrency miner, as he’s been mining Ethereum (ETH) with his son for the past year or two.
According to Business Insider, while speaking at the Blockchain Summit in Morocco, hosted by Sir Richard Branson, Brin revealed he first started noticing blockchain technology when his 10-year-old son asked him for a gaming PC.
He was quoted as saying:
A year or two ago, my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC. I told him, 'Okay, if we get a gaming PC, we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we set up an ethereum miner on there, and we've made a few pennies, a few dollars since.
During the conference Brin addressed zero-knowledge proofs and noted the concept is “really mind-boggling.” Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptography principle used by privacy-centric cryptocurrencies like Zcash, as they allow something to be proven, without revealing specific knowledge. In Zcash, zero-knowledge proofs enable privacy features by concealing transaction information.
He further revealed that Google wasn’t able to pick up blockchain technology before its competitors, noting that it “failed to be on the bleeding edge.” While the search giant’s co-founder admitted he didn’t know too much about cryptocurrencies, he touted the potential in their technology is “extraordinary.”
Brin, a last-minute addition to the conference, has in the past shown he’s paying attention to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, as he pointed to Ethereum mining as a central piece in the recent “boom of computing.”
In a letter to investors published back in May, Brin noted there were several factors influencing said boom, with the first one being Moore’s Law. He added:
The second factor is greater demand, stemming from advanced graphics in gaming and, surprisingly, from the GPU-friendly proof-of-work algorithms found in some of today’s leading cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum.
As CryptoGlobe covered, Google has reportedly been experimenting with blockchain technology earlier this year. Despite the Googler’s apparent interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, the search giant has earlier this year moved to ban cryptocurrency-related ads from its platform.
At the Blockchain Summit in Morocco was also the co-founder and chief executive officer of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark, who spoke about the lightning network (LN) and the security of centralized exchanges in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Per Stark’s words, the lightning network allows people to “transact at a high volume using the underlying blockchain technology. She added:
This is really powerful. I’ve really never been more excited about the future and the potential of what we’re building — building up the core technologies to bring them to the world.
