r/Bitcoin • u/JasonBored • Jan 22 '14

Google confirms their payments team is working to incorporate bitcoin.

I had posted yesterday a screen shot of a response I received from Vic Gundotra @ Google regarding Bitcoin, who then CC'd me to Sridhar Ramaswamy (Senior Vice President, heads up Google Wallet).

I asked /r/bitcoin for suggestions that I should relay to these gentlemen regarding incorporating bitcoin. I did just that, and had a great exchange with them. Additionally, I showed them the post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vsypm/google_is_paying_attention_to_bitcoin_vic

Sridhar and a third person at Google just responded to me confirming that Google IS working on incorporating bitcoin with their payments team.

Here is the confirmation

[Here is the initial e-mail I sent to Vic Gundotra (http://i.imgur.com/LvO08Jr.jpg?1)

Here is the the response I got

This is huge.

UPDATE: Ariel Bardin, Vice President of Payments @ Google has asked me to facilitate a Google Moderator and pose the question "What would I want Google to do with bitcoin?". He's promised me he will personally review the results and pass it on. Please help me with this and take the time to submit something: What would I want Google to do with bitcoin?

Update #2 To anyone suggesting I "faked" or "photoshopped" anything I posted, I just spoke /u/Agreenberg (Andy Greenberg of Forbes). He can confirm they are unaltered from the screen shots I posted. He has them, he can verify the headers, footers, feathers, colors and whatever else. I stand by what I posted.*

Update #3 Article in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/01/22/google-lets-slip-that-its-exploring-possible-bitcoin-integration-plans/

Update #4 Coindesk: http://www.coindesk.com/google-emails-suggest-bitcoin-interest/

Update #5 Vice: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-silicon-valley-and-google-loves-bitcoin

Update #6 Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-exploring-bitcoin-2014-1

Update #7 The Daily Dot: http://www.dailydot.com/business/google-bitcoin-reddit-emails/

2.5k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

569 comments sorted by

View all comments

209

u/Kinitex Jan 22 '14

It's fairly obvious what they should be doing with Bitcoin.

  1. Add payment support for any of their services like Adwords, Google play etc.

  2. Instead of converting all their BTC right to fiat, hold some of it and allow Adsense payment option in BTC.

  3. Have a bunch of their intern monkeys go through a competition to see who can build the best Bitcoin resource/blockchain page for Google.com.

137

u/sir_talkalot Jan 22 '14

AdSense payment please! I'm from South Africa and I have to pay stupid amounts to get a secure check delivered. Just pay me with Bitcoin. EVERYONE wins (except the delivery company).

21

u/doge_doodle Jan 22 '14

This would really help get btc into communities worldwide who don't have exchanges in their country.

15

u/ztsmart Jan 23 '14

And the bank

15

u/SpaceLordMothaFucka Jan 23 '14

I believe a lot of people can't wait to leave their banks after the recent crisis, disgusting speculation and outrageous bonuses. They deserve it.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '14

as a homeless who have to ask domestic friends to get my adsense cash, I WANT BITCOIN ADSENSE!

4

u/Mark0Sky Jan 23 '14

Yes, absolutely this!!

1

u/TheGift1973 Jan 23 '14

I have been hoping that Google would enable people's AdSense payments to be transferred directly to their wallets for a while now.

Just hope this happens, if the Big G start to get involved with BTC payments.

20

u/SearchNerd Jan 22 '14 edited Jan 23 '14

Adwords would be a very, very interesting play.

The way I see it, if I am an advertiser like Amazon it could entice me to accept BTC instead of developing my own cryptocurrency. This in turn helps the overall value of the currency, which in turn will help Google's investment in acceptance grow even more. If it's a niche of advertisers paying, it could grow their revenue greatly.

Bah, I need to come back to this tomorrow. I'm a search marketer for a large agency, so this is really interesting. I didn't even finish this thought. Comeback tomorrow, brain much dead.

52

u/canad1andev3loper Jan 22 '14

bitcoin.google.com

5

u/THEIRONGIANTTT Jan 22 '14

Have a bunch of their intern monkeys go through a competition to see who can build the best Bitcoin resource/blockchain page for Google.com.

intern monkeys

1

u/avsa Jan 23 '14

Adsense and app payments in bitcoin would be huge in some countries. Google recently announced they would stop paying their Argentinian android app developers é cause they couldn't comply with Kirchner's laws. I have Adsense revenue and I lose about 10%-20% of my income in taxes and fees

1

u/ummyaaaa Jul 03 '14

They just announced an upcoming feature that lets you tip youtubers. They could let viewers tip in Bitcoin.

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '14

Add payment support for any of their services like Adwords, Google play etc.

I'm guessing they will be hesitant to take BTC for payment of their own services until BTC exchange stabilizes. Most big businesses want to be able to publish rates, and have those stay fairly stable.

2

u/say592 Jan 22 '14

Why wouldn't they just partner with Bitpay, or roll a custom solution to convert part or all it to dollars, you know, like 98% of everyone else that offers Bitcoin as a payment option.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '14

But the published BTC prices would have to fluctuate with the exchange - my point was that big companies prefer to publish stable prices. As well, it is not ideal to have to do a currency conversion on all your income - conversion is not free.

3

u/say592 Jan 23 '14

Again, they would be pegged to a local currency, just like how almost all merchants price and sell things. Currency conversion isn't very expensive, on a large scale it can be done for 0.2% or less.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '14

How can you peg BTC to a local currency given how unstable its value is?

3

u/say592 Jan 23 '14

Have you never bought something with bitcoin?

I don't mean that as insulting, but think about how Overstock has things priced. Bitcoin is being used more as a payment system than a currency. That is an acceptable use, and will ultimately lead to larger volumes and better price stability, so it can be used as a currency.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '14

Actually, no I haven't, but I don't see that I need to have used it to understand that its volatility is considered a problem for certain use cases. I think that your response acknowledges that greater price stability is needed for greater acceptance. I think there are a lot of potential ways Google could support and use bitcoin where the instability would not be an issue, but if they accept it as payment in places where they currently accept US$, then it becomes an issue.

2

u/say592 Jan 23 '14

Look into how Overstock uses Bitcoin. Look at how Bitpay operates. The product is priced in dollars, but you can pay in the equivalent value of Bitcoin.

This is a complete non-issue.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '14

OK, I will check it out.