wikileaks: Google CEO shows interest to bitcoin

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

my impression is, that all of those big players watch bitcoin closely. but all of them also know that it is foolish to move too soon and just wait and see. bitcoin is still too small for anything serious.

I guess, the thing is when Facebook was nothing serious people could have seriously competed, providing they had the foresight to do so. Now that Facebook are serious it is to late, even Google struggle to compete with Facebook in that social realm. The big companies do not necessarily need to compete under an existing brand, they could simply use existing infrastructure and create a new brand/company. If successful simply merge the companies into a "partnership".

[nebulus]

I bet they found out about bitcoin on Google... Hah...

[Luckybit]

Schmidt is the guy who wants to make personal ownership of drones illegal.

Authoritarian from the word go.

Google + Bitcoin is not a good fit.  Western Union makes sense - even Amazon.  But not Google.

Why is personal ownership of drones good?

[BTC Books]

Schmidt is the guy who wants to make personal ownership of drones illegal.

Authoritarian from the word go.

Google + Bitcoin is not a good fit.  Western Union makes sense - even Amazon.  But not Google.

Why is personal ownership of drones good?

Wrong question.

Why is it bad?

[Luckybit]

Sounds like they JA is tossing ideas around very similar to namecoin ... and something like Ricardian contracts (Open Transactions) for important censorship resistant documents.

I thought this bit was salient also and should be stashed in memory for later use

Eric Schmidt: The average person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful lot of private keys involving commerce were taken.

... right here is all the reason you need to get into bitcoin.

talk to me about this more.  RSA is still used by banks and other online stores so how could it be that porous?

RSA relies on hard large primes and factoring but over time computing power can break certain version of RSA which aren't hard enough. That being said PGP is safe and RSA is safe because if it's 4096bit it's not going to be cracked.

[Luckybit]

It's not illegal now. Let's see Google try to make a rival to Bitcoin, and then eventually end up mining Bitcoin.

Coblee (Google employee I think) already made Litecoin.

Well that settles it but Litecoin and any other coin isn't a rival to Bitcoin but an alternative. Competition is good. IE was a rival to Netscape, and Opera a rival to them both and Webkit a rival to them all etc.

[Luckybit]

Schmidt: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."

and

“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

Open and transparent is what Google wants. This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't live in a world of corrupt authority, corrupt cops, frame jobs, set ups etc. Julian Assange being accused of rape and it's open so even if he's innocent his reputation is ruined?

Transparency helps and hurts depending on who is in law enforcement.

[ChristianK]

Open and transparent is what Google wants. This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't live in a world of corrupt authority, corrupt cops, frame jobs, set ups etc. Julian Assange being accused of rape and it's open so even if he's innocent his reputation is ruined?

Julian Assange's own story of what happened in those two night isn't open. There also various other information about the issue that isn't open.

Shhhhh... don't give them ideas! It is not just Google, even Facebook, Twitter and and all sorts of other sites could pull the rug under Bitcoin's feet if they decided to utilize their user base. The coins would def be different in terms of the technicalities, they certainly would not require mining. I think the only plus(for us) is that most big companies would probably be to stubborn and would make the coins centralized around there own branch of companies similar to how gift cards work.

Facebook actually has it's own coins. The same goes for Amazon.

If Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo all tried to start their own cryptos, they would all try to 51% attack each other. Nah, better they mine Bitcoins. If any of them tries to 51% attack Bitcoin, the others would defend Bitcoin to make sure they don't profit unfairly.

I don't think Google would design a crypto-currency in a way that it can be effectively 51% attacked.

If you are Google and actually can sign things with Google certificates, why rely only on proof-of-work for trust?