Sergey Brin Mines Ethereum and Admits Google’s Failure in Blockchain

Speaking at a blockchain conference in Morocco over the weekend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin expressed his interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Google missed its chance to be a leader in blockchain, while he has been mining Ethereum and making “a few pennies and dollars since,” he said.

Brin is currently president of Google’s parent company Alphabet. This weekend, he joined blockchain technology leaders and researchers on a panel at Richard Branson’s, an English business magnate, Blockchain Summit.

“We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I’ll be honest,” he said, referring to blockchain, but adds that he believes the technology is already within the wheelhouse of X, the company’s semi-secret research division.

In the blockchain world Google is mostly famous because of its decision to ban cryptocurrency ads. Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads, explained in March: “We don’t have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.” British experts have claimed Google’s ban on cryptocurrency-themed advertising is self-serving and says the search engine is “overstepping its role as a gatekeeper to information.”

Meanwhile, Brin now admitted he doesn’t know “a whole lot” about cryptocurrency, but that he has an amateur mining rig set up. “A year or two ago my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC. 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.” He adds, “that definitely got me interested and I started to study the technology behind it and found it to be fascinating.”

Nvidia, an American visual computing technology company, CEO Jensen Huang told MarketWatch in May “A lot of gamers, when they aren’t playing games, they’re doing a little mining. The reason why they bought it is for gaming, but while they’re not gaming — while they’re at school, at work, in bed — they’ll turn it on and do a little mining.”