Slashdot Mirror
Bank of America Wins Patent For Crypto Exchange System (coindesk.com)
New submitter psnyder shares a report from CoinDesk: [The patent] outlined a potential cryptocurrency exchange system that would convert one digital currency into another. Further, this system would be automated, establishing the exchange rate between the two currencies based on external data feeds. The patent describes a potential three-part system, where the first part would be a customer's account and the other two would be accounts owned by the business running the system. The user would store their chosen cryptocurrency through the customer account. The second account, referred to as a "float account," would act as a holding area for the cryptocurrency the customer is selling, while the third account, also a float account, would contain the equivalent amount of the cryptocurrency the customer is converting their funds to. That third account would then deposit the converted funds back into the original customer account for withdrawal. The proposed system would collect data from external information sources on cryptocurrency exchange rates, and use this data to establish its own optimal rate.
The patent notes this service would be for enterprise-level customers, meaning that if the bank pursues this project, it would be offered to businesses.
Did they just patent "Escrow, but on a computer"?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Banks patent new method to scam customers.
What exactly 'new & unique' in terms of technology did they create or patent here? They set up a 'workflow', it could be done in SharePoint for crying out loud,
I will use bitcoin when it comes in paper form and not attached to an account.
How the fuck is this not prior art? Literally Mt. Gox, Coinbase, etc
a single $100 bill for a cash deposit over $5k. Bank of America's fees are killing us. Tellers don't get paid that much, and I know since I used to work as one at BoA, so 30 cents for each bill when you were expected to count about 100 bills per minute is great profit for them.
3 card monte
Maybe they'll patent a machine that can count bills - or maybe even weigh them
Nullius in verba
time to sell, Sell, SELL!!!!!!
Because everyone loved getting tokens that could only be used at that one shitty arcade that charged 3 tokens to play one game of street fighter back in the day and refused to give "refunds".
bank patents:
1998 - Banking on the internet
2006 - Banking on a phone
2017 - Banking on a blockchain
2025 - Banking on a quantum computer
2040 - Banking in your brain
2100 - Banking on non-electronic pieces of paper. using non-electronic ink writing devices
There is absolutely no way I would do business with a bank that charged a fee like that. That's ridiculous. That's what they're there for.
Seriously? Last time I had to deposit a large amount (daily cafe takings, 3 years ago, Australia) the teller would just dump the notes in one machine, the coins in another, and press the start button. The cost: zero, presumably because they didn't want customers taking their accounts and moving to another bank.
The whole point of any currency is that you at least hold onto it for the short term of say a week to a month. The more people do that the more intrinsic value the currency has.
Official Bitcoin itself is flawed. Transactions take 15 minutes which unless your dealing with thousands of dollars is too long for your everyday POS transaction for coffee.
What they are describing is an escrow exchange stream. An automated stream system of currency conversions(in time). Nothing new or non obvious there.
It's basically tracks and predicts the value of a currency according to the unit of time(lag) it can faithfully get rid of it. For high end businesses will automatically treat e-coins as junk bonds. You can price your goods in your trusted currency and the system will suggest to you an exchange rate. When a customer buys with e-coin it will convert the e-coin to your preferred currency as quickly as possible.
If a small company did this the patent would either: 1) Never happen 2) get nullified very quickly.
Can we fix (destroy) the US's broken patent system?
It seems like BoA is trying to solve a problem that is already solved.
The point of currency is for trade, not to hold. So called intrinsic value by holding is nonsense, if no one is trading it for things they want.
This is one of the many reasons that bitcoin will fail, as the perceived value increases more people will hold it and not trade it, till the bubble bursts and everyone 'loses something'.
The sad thing is that counting by hand is still more accurate than by machine. We still pay the large fee for cash deposits at BoA since it helps us confirm our deposit slips.
You can't count by weight since, for example, a lot of black women pay us with sweaty and oily bills that they remove from their bras. I'm sure those bills weight several times what a clean bill does.
You guys are saying the same thing. The point is trade. To do that you need to be able to hold it for short terms - the time between when you have something someone wants and when someone has something you want. If you just turn currency around immediately, you don't get the benefit of not having to carry and store stuff all the time. It's basically just bartering but with extra steps.
You also need to be able to perform the transaction quickly and preferably inexpensively, but people will pay a high price for convenience, as evidenced by the credit card merchant fees. 15 minute transaction times mean that it can't be used for small purchases. Who is going to wait 15 minutes and a ten dollar transaction fee in payment for a sandwich?
Should I be happy because they'll almost certainly go after people burning energy on useless crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, or angry because patents on software methods should never be granted in the first place?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm pretty happy actually. What about you? Oh wait you probably don't own any Bitcoin.
"Crypto" is a well-established short form for "cryptography". It has nothing to do with "crypto currency", except that the latter uses the former, nicely demonstrating what was first. Stop abusing the language for desperate attempts to sound cool.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> Did they just patent "Escrow, but on a computer"?
No.
The patent is a bit hard to read, even as patents go. Best I can tell, they patented a particular system of using customers' public and private keys in two different cryptosystems to key the "vault" accounts used for an exchange, where the customer's balance on the block chain may have transactions awaiting confirmation. But it is a particularly difficult patent to read, especially if you don't know the technical details of crypto-currency.
We just found the guys that Jesus chased out of the Temple...
Sounds like they patented DRM for crypto currencies....
And you all hated DRM. Now you'll gonna love it...
If you want mine your own cryptocurrency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.