Goobles left the building.

before bitcoin had a whitepaper, google had its own virtual currency.

it was called Goobles.

in april 2005, a small group of google employees launched an internal prediction market called Prophit.

the idea was to turn everything google wanted to know into a market.

how many users would Gmail have?

would a product leave beta on time?

would google open a new office?

would an important hire be completed that quarter?

employees were given Goobles and used them to buy positions on different answers. if their prediction was right, the position paid out in Goobles.

the prices became a live view of what people inside google actually believed would happen.

this was happening while Gmail was still in beta, Google Maps had only just launched and YouTube had not even been acquired yet.

by september 2005, google said more than 1,000 employees had already traded on 146 events across 43 different subjects.

over the next few years, around 25 to 30 new markets were created every quarter. more than 1,400 people placed trades and about 20% of google employees took part at some point.

the markets covered serious company targets, product launches, office openings, user growth and competitors.

around a third of them were just for fun.

google employees traded on the quality of Star Wars Episode III, gas prices and anything else they wanted to argue about.

the fun markets didn’t distract from the serious ones. the research found that activity in both moved together. getting people to trade on stupid questions also made them more active on the questions google actually cared about.

employees even built automated trading bots that sometimes acted as market makers.

this was an internal digital economy with its own currency, markets, traders, bots, leaderboards and rewards.

all in 2005.

Goobles were not cryptocurrency and nobody was risking real money. that isn’t the point.

the point is that more than three years before the bitcoin whitepaper, employees at one of the largest technology companies in the world were already using virtual money to trade outcomes inside an online market.

at the end of every quarter, Goobles were converted into raffle tickets. google put up around $10,000 in quarterly prizes, but the real competition became the leaderboard and the status of being one of the best traders inside the company.

the system also exposed things normal company meetings couldn’t.

the research found a measurable optimism bias. markets linked to positive outcomes for google were overpriced by around ten percentage points.

the bias became stronger when google stock was going up.

new employees were some of the most optimistic traders. people with more experience became better calibrated over time.

even where someone sat mattered. employees sharing an office were more likely to hold similar positions, but the effect weakened quickly with physical distance.

Prophit was showing how information, confidence and bias travelled through google in real time.

one market gave a very low probability that google would complete a senior hire on schedule. instead of ignoring it, management reacted, made difficult decisions and completed the hire.

the fake currency was producing real information.

google believed the idea could become much bigger than an internal experiment. Prophit was originally intended to launch as an external product.

the company explored how it could bring prediction markets to the public, but the legal environment around online betting and financial markets became a wall.

after the financial crisis, the political appetite disappeared. the public launch stalled, resources moved elsewhere and Prophit eventually shut down in 2011.

Goobles never made it outside google.

fifteen years after Prophit first launched, google built another internal prediction market during the pandemic. that system eventually collected more than 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 employees.

the original idea never really died.

and the original currency was still sitting there in google’s own research paper.

page 2. footnote 3.

“artificial currency called Goobles in Google’s case.”

$GOOBLES brings that forgotten currency onchain.

the mechanic closes the loop.

fees generated from trading $GOOBLES buy $GOOGL and distribute it back to holders.

google’s old currency now rewards holders in google.

the name isn’t invented.

the history isn’t manufactured.

the connection to $GOOGL isn’t random.

google created Goobles.

google employees traded Goobles.

google documented Goobles.

and google once tried to take the market behind Goobles to the public.

two decades later, Goobles finally left the building.

buy Goobles. receive Google.