Bitcoin Forum

I am a newbie so I am posting here - please be forgiving if this is the wrong category - I am still getting familiar with this site.

The other day I was talking to my friend who is working for Google, mentioning bitcoin. To my surprise he was already somewhat familiar with it and told me that they are considering to add bitcoin as an option for Google Wallet and Google Checkout. I tried to get more info but my friend takes his NDA pretty serious and was reluctant to share any details. To me it seems that this will be huge and a real game changer. In fact, it will probably boost bitcoin popularity overnight. Does anyone else know more about it and is willing to share the details?

and bitcoins will replace the dollar, too.

I don't think this is funny. One of the issues: If a currency that has a maximum of only 21M units available sees large-scale adoption, precision may become an issue. People will be dealing with tiny fractions for daily purchases and you certainly don't want any floating point errors to occur. Looking at modern FPU implementations, likely this will be no problem but for a currency that will be used globally it may have been better to set this number a few magnitudes higher.

Maybe you're not a newbie, but just made this fresh account to seed some positive rumor to increase bitcoin price?

EDIT: after reading previous-sibling post, I'm not sure anymore what to think.

The comma can always be moved a few places. Precision and/or comma place isn't going to be a problem in the future. Both are very easily fixable.

noone's stopping you from trading in mBTC, µBTC or nBTC... no excuse for floating point errors any more than with dollars and cents.

True. I still think that 21M is a relatively small number and it would be more natural to deal with amounts closer to naturally countable (integer) numbers.

Back to my initial questions: Does anyone know more about Google's bitcoin ambitions and plans? The reason I am asking is not speculation with the currency but about a business model around bitcoin that I have in mind that would benefit greatly from knowing the time-scale of larger scale adoption of bitcoin.

It's doubtful you'll hear any news in this thread.  If there were any substantial information about this, it would already be the most discussed topic on the boards. 

I'm not surprised to hear that Google employees are aware of Bitcoin.  I believe the Bitcoin client for Android (based on the BitcoinJ library) was coded by a Google employee in his spare time. But of course that is far removed from Google itself taking any official stance.

If any system is using floating point numbers (and not integers) to store Bitcoins, that is a bug.

You know, that if this was true, the bitcoin/usd-price would skyrocket nearly instant. Don't expect something like this anytime soon.

As a general rule, financial systems should always store values in decimal format and not in floating point.

I dearly hope so, haha.

I'm working at Google, and while I don't have any news about people here talking about the company endorsing Bitcoin (and, even if I did, it'd almost certainly be confidential), I do know that there are at least several dozen Google employees who are familiar with Bitcoin and following it in the news.

This would be a very interesting development (if true).

Jesus, get real. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

That is because of how you were raised.  You'll adjust.  I promise.

If google takes over bitcoin, it may deviate from the original purpose of bitcoin, no government supervision is the key point.

isn't 'decimal format' just a fancy name for 'string with a dot in it'?

seems that way in mysql anyway.

Most clients use 64 bit integers and scale everything down by 0.00000001 for display.  But strings work too, but aren't as compact.

Pretty much. The only true way to store financial numbers on computers is with integers. Everything else is rather subjective.

As long as it's a lossless format, doesn't matter if you stored it as a string with a dot, or an integer with the decimal place shifted for display purposes.

I don't know why ppl. keep saying 21 million to 8 decimal places isn't enough units.   That's the ability to do 2.1 quadrillion transactions. The ability to make a secure transaction is all that matters. The digits are arbitrary.

Interesting point about the centralization/decentralization.

About the decimal discussion:


If we take the numbers from this (http://"http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world.htm") article and assume every human being on the planet has a need to hold an average of a 1000 units of currency and combine this with let's say ten billion humans in the near future I think we have nothing to worry about. (2.1*10^15 / 10*10^9 = 2.1*10^5; 21000 units per person)

What is not included in this calculation are other entities that hold currency such as companies. Any ideas on this?

What do you mean by "take over bitcoin"? Have >50% of hashing power?

I doubt they would want to do that, because that could kill bitcoin.

They could just use bitcoin as any other currency in google checkout, for paying ads or whatever, though. That wouldn't mean a centralization of bitcoin.

Google is a big organization now with a more conservative focus. Mozilla, OTOH could position themselves very well if they took the risk on bitcoin with web-browser based tools. I'm not starting any rumors, just opining.

http://www.smoothblog.co.uk/2011/08/11/google-admits-handing-european-user-data-intelligence-agencies/ (http://www.smoothblog.co.uk/2011/08/11/google-admits-handing-european-user-data-intelligence-agencies/)

Bitcoin intergration with google wallet/checkout would be HUGE!

But I wouldn't hold my breath.  Think you can squeeze any more details out of the guy?

Google cannot take over bitcoin, but they can make a lot of money in transaction fees if they jump into the game and popularize bitcoin. Hell, they can call their client "Googlecoin" for all I care, just as long as they use the same blockchain as we do.

Does Google accept foreign currencies like CAD or Euros or Rubles? Bitcoin is just like another foreign currency.

It was rumored a while ago that Paypal would begin taking BTC as funds.  Obviously, that was misinformation spread around, which I wouldn't be surprised if this was as well  ???