Slashdot Mirror
Australian 'Bitcoin Founder' Quietly Bidding For Patent Empire (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Craig Wright, the Australian who claimed to be the inventor of bitcoin, is attempting to build a large patent portfolio around the digital currency and technology underpinning it, according to associates of his and documents reviewed by Reuters. 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. 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. The granting of even some of the patents would be significant for banking and other industries that are trying to exploit bitcoin technologies, as well as dozens of start-ups scurrying to build business models based around it. Patents that Wright has applied for range from a mechanism for paying securely for online content to an operating system for running an "internet of things" on blockchain. A patent schedule, one of a number of documents relating to the applications shown to Reuters by a person close to the EITC Holdings, outlines plans to apply for about 400 in total.
... which is why Craig went on the whole trying-to-claim-he's-Satoshi spree which was immediately proven to be a fraud. One of the things he did was to insert current info into old posts, and backdating things, to make it appear he's been "in" Bitcoin longer than he has.
He's hoping there's enough doubt at the patent office to grant him the patents, with those dates as precedence.
it's in my head