Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai have a lot more in common than just their jobs. Both tech billionaires have crypto-savvy young sons who mine ethereum.
Pichai said his 11-year-old son mines ethereum on a home computer that Pichai built himself, according to Business Insider. He made the amusing revelation at the New York Times DealBook conference this week while — ironically — discussing tech addiction and the importance of limiting screen time for children.
“Last week I was at dinner with my son, and I was talking about something about bitcoin and my son clarified what I was talking about was ethereum, which is slightly different,” Pichai recounted. “He’s 11 years old, and he told me he’s mining it.”
When asked if he built a server to help with his son’s crypto mining efforts, Pichai said no, and insisted that his family only has one computer at home.
‘I Had to Explain How Paper Money Works’
Pichai said his son understands a lot more about virtual currencies than he does about fiat currency, so he had to explain how money works in real life.
“I had [to]explain to him how paper money actually works,” Pichai laughed. “I realized he understood ethereum better than how paper money works. I had to talk to him about the banking system, the importance of it. It was a good conversation.”
In July 2018, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed that he mines ethereum with his son, as CCN has reported.
Billionaire Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin is an Ethereum Miner https://t.co/QLB44rzAG4
— CCN (@CryptoCoinsNews) July 9, 2018
“A year or two ago, my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC,” Brin said. “I told him, ‘Okay, if we get a gaming PC, we have to mine cryptocurrency. So we set up an ethereum miner on there.”
Brin — whose net worth tops a staggering $47 billion — added that he and his son had made some money on crypto-mining.
“We’ve made a few pennies, a few dollars,” he joked.
Sergey Brin: ‘We Are in a Tech Renaissance’
As CCN reported, Brin has previously credited ethereum mining with playing a central role in the recent computing boom that is driving a “technology renaissance.”
Brin made the revelations in an enthusiastic letter to investors, where he raved: “We are truly in a technology renaissance, an exciting time where we can see applications across nearly every segment of modern society.”
Brin added: “There are several factors at play in this boom of computing. First, of course, is the steady hum of Moore’s Law…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.”
Featured Image from Ken Yeung/Flickr
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