Well, it's just an application.
The filing date is post the bitcoin white paper.
Examiners don't often use non-patent literature to reject new patents unfortunately. It just doesn't really happen often.
The problem is bitcoin doesn't have a group to enforce its IP. By this I mean the white paper. A lot of these cryptocurrency patents should be held invalid based on the existence of bitcoins and altcoins already in the marketplace. Ultimately, it depends on how the invention is claimed.
If these cryptocurrency patents are based on the bitcoin or block chain technology. They can still be valid if there are inventive steps inside their application.
Right, but I suspect some of these patents would not be valid if they looked at prior art of bitcoin and other altcoins. I'm thinking of the JPM patent and now this. Typically companies legal departments will challenge patents that do get through but should of been held unpatentable by the examiner. The examiners are not perfect and can miss prior art sometimes. Bitcoin doesn't have that body that is going back and challenging patents that possibly shouldn't have been issued. What I suspect the issue is are examiners are just drawing from existing patent literature and not looking outside that scope of literature.
For instance this one:
"1. A distributed crypto currency system, comprising: a non-transitory memory storing a plurality of previous transaction public keys that are each associated with a respective unauthorized crypto currency transfer as a result of a previous transaction; one or more hardware processors coupled to the memory and operable to read instructions from the memory to perform the steps of: receiving a payer public key that is associated with a current transaction between a payer and a payee; determining whether the payer public key is included in the plurality of previous transaction public keys; and in response to determining that the payer public key is included in the plurality of previous transaction public keys, sending a message to the payee to not proceed with the current transaction. "
Do you see anything in the first claim that is different from what currently exists? Perhaps they are differentiating themselves by the "message sent" when a transaction is invalid.