Posts Tagged: "blockchain"

Bitcoin was touted as the world’s first decentralized digital currency. It basically is a cryptocurrency which uses peer-to-peer technology to provide payment network gateway. Bitcoin is deliberately designed for public use by making it an open-source. Therefore, nobody owns or governs or control Bitcoin and everyone can be a part of it. Bitcoin financial infrastructure follows decentralized and automated systems which overcome the inefficiency of the traditional financial system. The unique feature of Bitcoin is that no one can block you from transferring money from anywhere in this world. Further, this makes whole transaction process irreversible. These transactions are recorded in a public distribution ledger called a blockchain.

With a high-level understanding of what blockchain is, you might ask “why is it important?” Blockchain has many implications, but it is going to change how we interact with each other and over time will make peer to peer interaction the norm… It occurred to me that blockchain could have a massively beneficial impact on the patent industry and patent asset class… Applying blockchain, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve patents, the industry and the asset class is our mission.

Liquidity in markets for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is opening a new door for musicians and athletes to issue digital tokens in exchange for money. The tokens are validated by blockchain, a public ledger used for the authentication of digital currency transactions, and backed by copyright, trademark or other IP assets… According to Naraghi, blockchain specifically is critical to the securitization of IP because it guarantees the validity of a transaction by recording the transaction on a main centralized register as well as a connected publicly distributed system of registers. The fact that data is embedded within a public network and updated with each transaction promotes transparency and prevents modification or corruption.

The SEC has landed on a definition which includes both permissioned distributed ledgers and permissionless distributed ledgers in the term “blockchain.” This is not surprising, nor is it necessarily the result of a misinformed view. There are lots of market opportunities and reasons for enterprise permissioned distributed ledgers, as there was always market appetite for permissioned systems in general. These ventures use the term “permissioned blockchain” intentionally and purposefully. After all, the transactions are batched in blocks that are linked to each other. So, there is a chain of blocks, and some kind of consensus protocol. But is that sufficient for a blockchain, really? And what ‘blockchain’ is the SEC referring to when it references “the blockchain”?

In 2008, as the financial markets crumbled in the largest economic crisis the world has seen since the 1930s, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper describing his Bitcoin network and the blockchain technology that was used to enable it.  Since then, while markets have recovered, Nakamoto’s creation has flourished and spawned countless other “altcoins” along with new uses and applications for his blockchain technology and its derivatives. Because the Bitcoin network and blockchain technology have become key components of today’s digital economy, it is important for attorneys and others to understand the basic terminology and features of this technology.  This article provides high-level explanations for this purpose.

Blockchain technology has already disrupted the financial sector and new blockchain use cases are emerging every day — from corruption-proof land registries to licensing digital assets, to tracking individual diamonds. In fact, there are many who say that blockchain technology has the potential to be as disruptive as the Internet… To stop patent trolls, the Chamber of Digital Commerce launched the Blockchain Intellectual Property Council (BIPC) this year. BIPC’s goal is to develop a global, industry-led defensive patent strategy that will nip blockchain patent trolling in the bud. Its first meeting on March 30th attracted 40 participants. In the next meeting in April, that number rose to 70. The BIPC executive committee members are the “who’s who” list of blockchain stakeholders, including Chain, Digital Asset, IBM, Microsoft, CoinDesk, Blockstream, Bloq, Civic, Cognizant, Deloitte, Digital Currency Group, Ernst & Young, Gem, Medici Ventures, T0.com, TMX and Wipfli.

A blockchain is a subtype of distributed ledger data structure, in which transactions are grouped into “blocks” that reference each other in cryptographic hashes. Technologies are developing that implement blockchains to solve all sorts of problems related to transactions: privacy, security, data integrity, double-spending, dynamic/smart contracting, payments, interoperability, etc. I started in this space over a year ago, when there was very little published literature on blockchain technologies, including published patent applications. Times have changed; now patent applications for blockchain technologies are readily available, with many patents granted. Blockchain technologies are a red-hot investment and development space right now and will be for at least the next couple of years. Many blockchain technology innovators begin with the same concerns. These concerns inspire the following five points of considerations for innovators in blockchain technologies who are interested in securing intellectual property rights.

The concept of the central clearing house in financial systems could be completely obviated with the use of blockchain. Blockchain is a distributed database system that decentralizes the financial ledger; instead of the ledger being held and checked by the clearing house, each member of the blockchain network receives an updated ledger every time a transaction is made on the system. It’s a peer-to-peer system which reduces financial transaction risk through massive redundancy. With every member of the blockchain system holding a copy of the ledger for every transaction that has been completed, going back to the beginning of the blockchain, it becomes easier to identify malicious activity on the financial network or prevent transactions if users don’t have enough cryptocurrency. New transactions are recorded on blocks, which are added to the blockchain. Blockchain systems like bitcoin often reward those in the blockchain system who offer their computing resources to record new blocks; this incentivized process is known as mining.

Many of the patents we noticed in our recent survey of BofA technologies are related to enhanced security methods for financial transactions, such as the innovation protected by U.S. Patent No. 9218596, entitled Method and Apparatus for Providing Real Time Mutable Credit Card Information. It discloses a smartcard apparatus having a microprocessor chip, a button, a dynamic transaction authorization number and a Bluetooth low energy device (BLE) that works to transmit an instruction to a smartphone for a request for a dynamic transaction authorization number when the button is depressed and receive the number from the smartphone; the smartcard further has a battery and a dynamic magnetic strip comprising a digital representation of the dynamic authorization number. This technology is designed to enhance security measures in smartcards having magnetic strips without requiring a banking institution to issue new cards. Enhanced security for banking transactions taking place on cloud infrastructures is featured within U.S. Patent No. 9184918, entitled Trusted Hardware for Attesting to Authenticity in a Cloud Environment. I