Bitcoin is patented?

[bitcoinrocks]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Who are these inventors?

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, Charles Bry

[zebedee]

Honey badger doesn't give a shit. 

[freequant]

Good luck suing the network for patent infringement.

[Lethn]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHHHH!!

They clearly don't know about Bittorrent and how the internet works do they? I swear, any time people like this try control everything they're going to make my work in operating my business a lot easier.

[Birdy]

patent trolls, one of the worst kind of trolls.

[frankenmint]

Honey badger doesn't give a shit. 

Avatar approved

[leemar]

Interesting, the submission date pre-dates Satoshi's paper unless I am mistaken?

[warut]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Who are these inventors?

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, Charles Bry

They are very likely to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#Satoshi_Nakamoto

[BitcoinBarrel]

Something smells fishy.

[revans]

Calling this a 'patent troll' is just laughable. The Bitcoin domain name was registered 3 days after this paper was published. The registration happened in Finland, and it just so happens that one of the people named on the paper had travelled there 6 months previously. Both this paper and the Bitcoin whitepaper contain the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse".

Given that 2 of the three have an intelligence community background, one might have expected the Bitcoin cultists to do a bit of digging.

[TKeenan]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:
http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Are you dense?  Not even.  You must consider the claims...
A method for providing secure communications, the method comprising:
generating a shared secret known to a first node and a second node;
generating a utilized key and a stored key from the shared secret;
using the utilized key to encrypt messages between the first node and the second node;
generating a new shared secret known to the first node and the second node; and
deriving a new utilized key and stored key.
'generating a shared secret' - shared secret cryptography is completely different than asymmetric cryptography.  Bitcoin uses asymmetric cryptography - there are no shared secrets.  100% sure (I'll bet you 1000BTC) this patent does not cover anything to do with bitcoin.

Go back to work.  

[argov]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Who are these inventors?

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, Charles Bry

They are very likely to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#Satoshi_Nakamoto

Hmmm, maybe they are indeed.

[bbit]

LOL patent? LOL

[bluemeanie1]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Who are these inventors?

Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, Charles Bry

not sure if the OP patent covers Bitcoin, but it is relevant that IBM has been nosing around this space lately.  They are some of the worst patent trolls in the field and they have billions invested in selling financial technologies to Wall St. etc.  Remember what happened when they bought Red Hat?

http://www-935.ibm.com/industries/financialmarkets/
http://techrights.org/2013/09/20/ibm-pr/

IBM's hardware sales have not been going well lately: http://gigaom.com/2013/10/17/for-ibm-hardware-news-is-bad-news/

[DeeSome]

Why did it take almost two years from filing date to publication?

Something smells fishy.

[IsaacGoldbourne]

Calling this a 'patent troll' is just laughable. The Bitcoin domain name was registered 3 days after this paper was published. The registration happened in Finland, and it just so happens that one of the people named on the paper had travelled there 6 months previously. Both this paper and the Bitcoin whitepaper contain the phrase "computationally impractical to reverse".

Given that 2 of the three have an intelligence community background, one might have expected the Bitcoin cultists to do a bit of digging.

I was just doing some googling and found that too, can anyone who is better than me at this do some more research into it?

[crazy_rabbit]

It looks like there is a patent covering Bitcoin:
http://www.google.com/patents/US20100042841

Are you dense?  Not even.  You must consider the claims...
A method for providing secure communications, the method comprising:
generating a shared secret known to a first node and a second node;
generating a utilized key and a stored key from the shared secret;
using the utilized key to encrypt messages between the first node and the second node;
generating a new shared secret known to the first node and the second node; and
deriving a new utilized key and stored key.
'generating a shared secret' - shared secret cryptography is completely different than asymmetric cryptography.  Bitcoin uses asymmetric cryptography - there are no shared secrets.  100% sure (I'll bet you 1000BTC) this patent does not cover anything to do with bitcoin.

Go back to work. 

1000BTC is a big amount to bet. IF you really want to bet, I'd say be more reasonable. :-)

[C. Bergmann]

Bitcoin itself is a patent by nature which doesn't need any enforcement. It's a peace of code which is not copyable without destroying its function.

[countryfree]

Why did it take almost two years from filing date to publication?

Something smells fishy.

No, that is normal. It's always like this. There are background checks for each patent, and it takes an awfully long time to make sure that there isn't another patent on the same thing.