Someone alerted me to a facebook post:
PATENT 060606 is a Cryptocurrency System using body activity data in humans…. The patent is owned by Microsoft-Bill Gates. ..Again.. not a conspiracy theory…! For some this is absolutely shocking or unbelievable…. For others.. we have seen this coming all along…. This post isn’t to fuel fear..it’s to raise awareness…
You can look up the patent here: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606
My quick take… First, Microsoft is not Bill Gates. Gates is a large shareholder, but he has stepped back entirely. Gates does not influence MS any longer the way Bezos, for example, influences Amazon. Gates began the process of separation 20 years ago, and recently relinquished even his seat on the Board. During the 1990s MS did operate completely in the image of Gates, in the sense that his personal strengths and weaknesses were mirrored everywhere in the organization (the state of Amazon today with Bezos). But those days are long gone and MS has had two CEOs since then. The current one in particular has utterly changed the corporate culture from the Gates days. So anyone who points out what MS does today and claims that it in any way has to do with the personality of Bill Gates simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Meanwhile, it helps to understand the nature of the patent system in the US, and the fading blockchain goldrush. Most patents are to secure a fairly obvious idea–like, x, but with a computer–so the filing entity can’t be sued for using some permutation of it later. Though patents are supposed to be non-obvious, and a logical person would imagine that they are all unique, neither is actually a feature of the patent system today. There are all sorts of overlapping patents issued, and a huge number are not remotely original. Big companies amass thousands of patents per year as a sort of defensive wall. If another entity tries to sue them, they look through their own portfolio to see if there is something they have remotely related to what their attacker is using, and they file their own suit using that one. Then they both agree to settle and leave each other alone. Inside of companies they incentive employees to file as many patents as they can.
Starting in 2016 there was a rush of blockchain-related patents, many of which were somewhat “like x, but with blockchain”. Between 2016 and 2019 there were some 9000 of these patents granted. This one is pretty much, “logging user activity, but with blockchain”. It is a low-quality patent, the main value of which is to defend against extortion if you do someday write an application that logs user activity using blockchain. Because if MS didn’t get the patent first, someone else would have gotten it, and then started suing every entity that tried to log user activity with blockchain. And such suits are a real hassle and cost millions to defend against. You can also bet there are a dozen versions of this concept that have been patented, either by MS or by other entities, even though logically patents are supposed to be non-obvious and unique.
Speculation not grounded in an understanding of the systems from which the data point was plucked are ignorant.
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