Bitcoin Forum

Do you guys think that Patents will be as important in BitCoin industry as in other high tech industries?

I have recently published a report on patenting within the BitCoin and cryptocurrency technology industries.  I analyzed patenting trends within the cryptocurrenty industry to get a better understanding of the players represented and their relative levels of investment.  Specifically, I have searched for all US granted patents, pending applications, and international applications containing the word "bitcoin", "cryptocurrency" or "cryptographic currency".  My search returned 65 results which seems really low.

Visa was found to be the owner of the most BitCoin and cryptocurrency related patents where as MasterCard, PayPal, and Amazon don't own any.  Any theories on why that is?  They may be dabbling in cryptocurrency technologies but don't seem to be protecting their innovations.  If I were an investor in one of these companies, I might be worried that these titans of payments and commerce will be late to the BitCoin game.

I wrote up my findings in this short blog post: http://www.preferredembodiment.com/1/post/2014/03/whos-patenting-bitcoin-technologies-and-whos-not.html

Your search terms might not be representative of the patent space pertaining to Bitcoin. I vaguely remember seeing a patent application by a big company that was clearly very Bitcoin-like, but deliberately avoided all the associated jargon, e.g. Bitcoin, cryptocurrency etc. Reading it you would have thought they had never heard of Bitcoin and came up with all those innovations by themselves. In other words the typical phony US patent, concocted to reap great profits from the work of other people.

I sent you a message to the email form on your website. I think it's a very important area of discussion that is largely either ignored or dismissed within the community currently when it's something that deserves a very thorough discussion.