Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Bitcoin Rival or Lost Chance? J.P. Morgan Applies to Renew a 13-Year Old Anonymous Payments Patent

This is damn fascinating. MarketWatch reports:
The Internet is going wild over a recently discovered patent application filed by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM -0.11% for a digital-payment network that it describes as “a computer-implemented method of providing an anonymous payment.”

The craze was due in part to similarities between the patent and bitcoin, especially the use of the description “anonymous payment” and the open publication of payment addresses on the Internet. Read the rest here.
Note well: Although this article refers to Bitcoin as providing for anonymous payment. That is far from the case. I just finished an interview with Sarah Meiklejohn, for The Robert Wenzel Show. She is from the University of California, San Diego and a Bitsoin expert. During the interview she explains how easy it is to track transactions to individuals who are using Bitcoins and how most people using bitcoins are nowhere near operating in the anonymous Bitcoin environment that they think they are.

The interview will be posted here at EPJ on Sunday at 7:00 AM ET.

2 comments:

  1. Knowing how crony's operate, I'll bet they try to use the patent as a hammer on the exchanges.

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  2. How many people in the world are dabbling in all this virtual currency, maybe 5% of the world, how the fuck does that devalue the crap dollar that was devaluing anyway.

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