Google’s Founder: Ethereum a Factor in the “Boom of Computing” – A Mention In The Official Letter to Alphabet Investors

Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, in an investor relations letter, has a lot of optimistic things to say about the positive developments in technology and, specifically, Ethereum.

Saying that we are in the midst of a “technology renaissance”, the Alphabet president began the letter by quoting Charles Dickens and contrasting the possibilities of technology with its dangers,

We’re in an era of great inspiration and possibility, but with this opportunity comes the need for tremendous thoughtfulness and responsibility as technology is deeply and irrevocably interwoven into our societies.

Certainly the world is at a precipice, a time when several major platforms are facing criticism for fake news, a lack of privacy, and/or imposing questionable censorship. With the emerging technologies of Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, blockchain technology, and the growth of computational power, the potential for good only grows stronger. Brin says,

There are several factors at play in this boom of computing. First, of course, is the steady hum of Moore’s Law, although some of the traditional measures such as transistor counts, density, and clock frequencies have slowed. 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. However, the third and most important factor is the profound revolution in machine learning that has been building over the past decade.

Ethereum and Google together made some news last year when Vitalik Buterin revealed that he received an email from Google asking him to work with the company on a cryptocurrency related project. Buterin, quite memorably, turned it down.

The letter does not touch upon blockchain or cryptocurrency apart from the brief mention of Ethereum, but it indicates that Brin sees a place in the world where distributing computing platforms like Ethereum could make great positive contributions to the world. Google Cloud has added Ontology (ONT) to its platform, and has released datasets for Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Dash (DASH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), and Zcash (ZEC).