Amazon Patent Marketplace for Bitcoin Data Gets Approved
Amazon Technologies Inc. won a patent for a marketplace involving data feeds and bitcoin trading.
The US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday approved the Amazon.com subsidiary’s September 2014 filing for a patent.
The Amazon patent can correlate different data streams. It will also sell the combined feed as a subscription to people who want to track that data.
Further, the users could pay to learn who sent a given cryptocurrency payment, who received it, and what the sender expects to receive in return. This is because blockchain addresses themselves are pseudonyms.
And connecting on-blockchain transactions to off-platform events ascertains the identities of the individuals who use those addresses. Example of this is the shipping of goods from one street address to another.
The Amazon patent said the company developed a technology for processing streaming data on a large scale with relatively low latency. This was for meeting the needs for organizations in managing of large amounts of data.
Additionally, the filing said that developers could “build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations, and make other real-time business or operational decisions.”
Furthermore, the platform would able to process information from different sources. These include “web site click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, operational logs, metering data and so forth.”
In addition, the file describes a use case regarding a cryptocurrency market “data stream that publishes or includes global Bitcoin transactions (or any cryptocurrency transaction).”
The transactions are completely visible to all participants in the network.
Customers, who want to consume data may subscribe to the desired data stream. They can “optionally select desired enhancements that are not already included in the desired data stream.”
Amazon Patent Could Help Law Enforcement
Since the Amazon patent would sell individuals’ data directly to buyers. Also government and law enforcements are included.
The author of the patent makes an example of a law enforcement agency. That strategy could desire to “receive global Bitcoin transactions. Correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to Bitcoin addresses.”
“The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB (gigabyte), for example, and the agency can start running analytics on the desired data using the analysis module,” the patent added.
Henri Pihkala, CEO of Streamr told CoinDesk that “data marketplaces aren’t a new idea.” However, “what is novel, is creating a space that finally gives users ultimate control over data they create through actions in the digital realm.”
“If that’s Amazon’s ultimate vision, then bravo,” he added. “But something might suggest it’s not in the company’s DNA to think like that.”
