Bitcoin’s underlying Blockchain has become the hottest thing in the technology sector, and every industry segment is trying hard to get a piece of it. The English telecom giant, British Telecom has joined the pack by applying for patents related to its work no distributed ledger technology.
According to a recent report by one of the media outlets, the telecom company has filed at least six patent applications since the beginning of this year. Blockchain, created initially as a ledger to record Bitcoin transactions is part of an open source technology. However, with the emergence of more uses of the technology, companies have started looking for ways to commercialize it. Leading banking, financial services, and technology companies are now part of a “patent race”, filing applications before the competition.
The patents filed by British Telecom deals with a range of applications. One such application includes a mechanism to detect and mitigate blockchain attack. The publication quotes the patent application stating,
“Despite the architecture of blockchain systems, malicious attacks present a threat to the security and reliability of blockchains. One such malicious attack involves a single entity (or entities under common control) procuring or appearing to procure sufficient computing resource to constitute more than half of all mining resource working with a blockchain.”
British Telecom’s one other patent discusses the implementation of access control using blockchain data structure.
The number of cryptocurrency related patents are expected to further increase in the future. Recently, there have been reports of Craig Wright’s (who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto) plans to file a large number of patents in the coming years.
Increasing blockchain related patent applications have caused concern among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If the companies are granted patents, then they may hamper further innovation in the sector by blocking the development and usage of the protected technology, which was open source in the first place.
Ref: City AM | Image: NewsBTC