Quote from: Gears on October 21, 2017, 09:30:25 AM

Its Bank of America what did you expect it? Even without technological knowledge you can deduct it is about money! If there is a good idea and it works just fine and is free don't be surprised some suits in corpo try to make more money and try put paten on it. Back in 2015 there was a scandal about expired patent on drug Cycloserine that went up in 24h from 500$ to 10.800$ after acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. This is just example how greedy some companies can be.

I believe open source software should be FREE and everyone should have easy access. I think Bank of America try to patent some part of Bitcoin/Blockchain technology to stop other banks from using it in the future for free, even on first place is FREE and open source.

Gears, unfortunately, their patent application covers a wide range of applications using the blockchain - they are technically speaking, patenting the blockchain itself (eg. is the patent I have included). The blockchain itself is a distributed transaction-processing system. Most of the work on the blockchain are open source and should remain that way unless they really have something novel.

Quote from: aplistir

US has strange patent laws. They can patent anything that has not been patented yet. Do you want to patent the wheel?

In civilized countries, you can only patent things that you have invented.
And in addition to that you can only patent things that are not published anywhere before the patent application has been filled. (even if it is published by you) And you can not patent anything that is not a new INNOVATIVE invention. Meaning that if a specialist of the field thinks that it is "general" knowledge, it cant be patented.

It is also much easier to get a patent in the US. In eg. Europe the patents are examined more throughly beforehand.
In US the real validity of a patent is examined in the court IF anyone decides to challenge the patent. Everywhere else the patent is examined during the patent application process.

In Europe even Satoshi could not patent the blockchain, because it is already published.

The US patent law is actually broken. And in this case if BoFA is given the patent, it could harm the entire cryptocurrency industry. Problem is that due to international agreements between signatories, US patent laws have far-reaching effects, and this means internationally too. This is the reason why more companies patent their invention in the US first.