Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google LLC who has a net worth of $1.2 billion and annual salary of around $200 million, has discovered that his 11-year-old son has been mining Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH). According to Pichai, he had been discussing how bitcoin (BTC) works during a family dinner and his son interrupted the conversation to tell the Google executive that his explanation might not be accurate.
Pichai's Son Reveals He Mines Ether
Pichai’s son pointed out that his father was actually talking about what Ethereum does. This is when the Google CEO’s son revealed that he was mining ether. Notably, the 11-year-old said he had been using a regular computer, and not a specialized server or custom ASIC, to mine the digital currency.
In July, billionaire Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, revealed that his 10-year-old son had been mining the cryptocurrency as well. Brin shared this with a large audience at a Blockchain Summit held in Morocco while also expressing his fondness of zero-knowledge-proofs (ZKPs). ZKPs are used by many different coins such as Zcash in order to make transactions more difficult to trace, which helps to enhance user privacy.
Learning About Crypto
While Pichai might not have inspired his son to learn about Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, Brin said he was actually helping his son learn about crypto as the two were mining ether together (as a collaborative effort). Commenting on how he encouraged his son to start learning about cryptocurrencies, Brin said:
A year or two ago, my son insisted that we needed to get a gaming PC… I told him, ‘Okay, if we get a gaming PC, we have to mine cryptocurrency.’ So we set up an Ethereum (ETH) miner on there. Sergey Brin
Notably, Brin’s son was able to quickly understand how blockchain-based digital currencies work, however, the Google founder had to carefully explain to the youngster how fiat currencies - which are issued by centralized governments - “actually work.”
"Pocketful Of Quarters"
Prichai and Brin’s kids are not the only ones who are involved in what Xapo founder Wences Casares describes as an “intellectual experiment.” As CryptoGlobe reported in March, an 11-year-old named George Weiksner launched his own initial coin offering (ICO) in order to raise between 1,000 to 2,000 ETH. Weiksner had been planning to raise enough money to be able to develop a project called “Pocketful of Quarters” - a crypto platform for gamers.
Online gamers are unable to transfer unspent coins, or tokens, from one game to another. Weiksner had proposed that by purchasing his platform’s cryptocurrency called Quarters (Q), users will be able to free up money that may have been lost due to non-transferrable in-game tokens. The Quarters could then be used to pay for things in other online games.