Fake Satoshi Nakamoto Trying To Patent All Sorts Of Bitcoin Related Ideas
from the ordinary-skill dept
Earlier this week I got knocked out by some pretty serious food poisoning. The few times I would try to do some work or pop in on Twitter, all I was seeing was people mocking the London Review of Books' somewhat insane 35,000-word-long profile of Craig Wright, the guy who earlier this year claimed to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto. While he even convinced Gavin Andresen (the guy who really turned Nakamoto's original work into actual Bitcoin), many others quickly pointed out that Wright's "proof" appeared to be a giant scam. Why write a 35,000-word profile on a guy who isn't Satoshi Nakamoto? I don't know, but thankfully the food poisoning and the few snarky tweets I saw saved me from digging into the entire thing and wasting an afternoon. Fusion posted a much shorter summary of the piece, in case you're wondering.Buried in all of this was a plot by Wright and a Canadian company named nTrust, to basically patent all the Bitcoin/blockchain stuff they could think of, and then after Wright was revealed to be Nakamoto, sell it off for ONE BILLLLLLLLLLION DOLLARS.
The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications – he appeared to have hundreds of them – and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was never to operate it.’Elsewhere in the report, Wright talks about having "hundreds of patents and papers in progress -- research from the beginning." And later, a colleague of Wright's mentions a plan to push for "upwards of four hundred patents." It seems noteworthy, of course, that at least in the US you're supposed to file for a patent within a year of any public use or description of the invention. If he's trying to patent stuff "from the beginning," he might be a bit late.
Either way, while the big reveal hasn't worked the way they intended (because it appears to be bullshit), Wright is still moving forward on the patent front. He's been applying for a ton of patents related to blockchain technologies:
Since February, Wright has filed more than 50 patent applications in Britain through Antigua-registered EITC Holdings Ltd, which a source close to the company confirmed was connected to Wright, government records show.Because nothing says revolutionizing money and technology like creating a giant patent troll to block such innovations.
Interviews with sources close to EITC Holdings Ltd, which has two of Wright's associates as directors, confirmed it was still working on filing patent applications and Britain's Intellectual Property Office has published another 11 patent applications filed by the company in the past week.
"It looks like he is trying to patent the fundamental building blocks of any blockchain, cryptocurrency, or distributed ledger system," said Antony Lewis, a consultant on bitcoin issues to whom Reuters showed the patent titles and some of the texts.In seeing some of the talk about the LRB article, some people keep pointing to the fact that Wright is trying to patent all this stuff as some sort of evidence that he really knows a lot about Bitcoin and the blockchain. People seem to have this magical spell come over them in that they think patents actually connote some sort of special status on people -- perhaps because they don't spend much time wading through tons and tons of ridiculous patents and wacky inventors insisting the patents matter much more than they really do.
Either way, if Wright gets his patents, whether or not he's truly Nakamoto, he could create an awful lot of problems for the advancement of Bitcoin and the blockchain. Because that's what patents are really for: blocking innovation, rather than encouraging it.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: bitcoin, blockchain, craig wright, patent troll, patents, satoshi nakamoto
Companies: ncrypt
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Makes no sense
"The public bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one million bitcoins.[8] As of 19 June 2016, this is the equivalent of US$758 million."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto
If the real Nakamoto has so much wealth what would he want with the Bitcoin patents?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
And in much of the rest of the world, there is no grace period at all. I'm not aware of any countries that offer more than a one year grace period (but I'm happy to be corrected there).
That seems like kind of a huge problem for technology that has been extensively analyzed and discussed for several years now.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
old plot
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Every currency has counterfeiting attempts, confidence schemes and theft. If those things invalidated a currency, we wouldn't have any.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
government records.it has many possible uses outside a currency,
When the web browser was invented ,
No one thought it would be used for business video streaming meetings, live streaming games ,
streaming music or video,s to phones or tvs.
Someone thinks of a basic idea or process ,
do this on a pc on the web,
they get a patent on it .
And they can control or block innovation in that sector .one of the reasons why the idea of software patents is
a bad idea and bad for society and consumers .
Any basic programmer could write patents in a few days
on the idea of a blockchain being used for banking or
selling stocks or being used to record various financial
transactions .
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Patents
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
And on a more objective note, wasn't the big selling point of Bitcoin that it's a decentralized system that can't be controlled by any malicious authority? When we consider that Bitcoin mining is so overwhelmingly dominated by a relatively small Chinese cartel that the actual Bitcoin developers are unable to fix widely-acknowledged bugs in the system because the Chinese don't want them fixed, is that not an objective sign of failure?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Maybe not, but when the webcam was invented almost immediately afterwards, plenty of people could see it coming. All we needed was for bandwidth to catch up...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
That's exactly what Craig wants - we discuss it on Reddit, Quora, everywhere. And the prices are the most important issue here. Yoav Vilner wrote a sarcastic article on Forbes: Can The Real Satoshi Nakamoto (Or Craig Wright) Please Stand Up?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Btw, there's a great amount of comments about "Satoshi" Craig in Jemima Kelly's journalist report here. As a post-analysis on https://domyessay.today/ by Linda Deboit.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Bitcoin has always been filled with fraud and scamming almost from the first day. None of this should surprise anyone.
Australian online casino
[ link to this | view in thread ]
good share! Thanks by https://www.google.com/
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Bitcoin is the future of the digital world! https://onlinerealmoneyslots.com/
[ link to this | view in thread ]
best crypto bot
Absolutely agree! <a href="https://safetrading.today/bots/crypto-trading-bots/">best crypto bot</a>.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Hey
Hey. Thank you very much! It is very interesting!
https://cashspotusa.com/lenders/sov/323-big-picture-loans
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Hi
Thank you so much.
I can advise you [https://qyto.co.uk/ethereum-casinos/](ethereum casino)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Thank you for sharing. Recently I finished my article about technical classes: https://techmoran.com/2019/12/12/should-students-have-more-technology-classes/
[ link to this | view in thread ]