For folks like Google PoW mining makes sense as they can recover some of their investment in that h/w, but it doesn’t work any more because regular servers just don’t deliver any more. PoS is also not ideal because if they need the servers for their own business activities (and presumably those pay better) they have to delete the data stored on them.
Which is I suppose why Google could be interested in turning their idle server pools into an Ethereum Matrix (mixed PoW/PoS).
To me that doesn’t seem like a good idea:
- You don’t need to pay a horde of execs to run a MaidSafe farm. As a shareholder I’d go nuts if I saw they’re using the h/w bought with my money to mine MaidSafe! (I’m not a Google shareholder and never will be).
- There’s no way they can get any decent ROI on that (my arguments are in Feasibility of datacenter farming (and the risk of farmer centralization))
- In the very unlikely case that the approach could work for them, that would defeat the whole purpose of MaidiSafe. (Additionally, a huge farming player (or several) should be seen as risks to the well being of the network.)