In a recent speech to the Mobile World Congress, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt revealed that Google once considered developing its own currency, named Google Bucks.
The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals.
Google dropped the idea because of the legal problems it would inevitably create.
It’s a shame we didn’t find out more about Google Bucks from Schmidt. It would be interesting to find out more about how Google saw this currency working. It isn’t clear how it differed to other P2P payment systems such as Barclay’s PingIt, so could Google Bucks potentially be reborn in a different guise in the future?
It really would be interesting to know what Google envisioned with this peer to peer system. I wonder if they were thinking about a mutual credit system like Favabank / LETS or were they thinking about something along the lines Bitcoin?
It’s unfortunate that they didn’t. The greatest power a government has over its people is not its laws but its currency. Imagine flights from the dollar to googlebucks during the recession, instead of swiss francs, and euros. If all google did was say that it would not depreciate its currency, then effectively it would very easily become the dominant world currency for exchange.