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Amazon awarded patent for streaming data marketplace with bitcoin uses
Amazon Technologies Inc., a unit of Amazon.com Inc., has been awarded a patent for a streaming data marketplace that can track data in real-time and also track cryptocurrency transactions.
The patent, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2014 and approved on Tuesday, describes a system to process streaming data on a large scale with relatively low latency. It allows developers to “build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations and make other real-time business or operational decisions.”
At first glance that may not make a lot of sense, but where the application becomes interesting is with its use case examples, two of which cover tracking bitcoin transactions.
“For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address,” one use case reads. “The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream.”
In another use case, the system could be used by “a law enforcement agency to track and trace global bitcoin transactions, correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses.”
Not all use cases related to bitcoin. Others describe uses such as website clickstreams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation, social media, operational logs and metering data.
Technology companies patent systems, products and processes all the time and many never get applied to real-world products. There’s no suggestion from Amazon that it intends to debut a new product using the system described.
That said, if it is planning to bring to market a product based on the trademark, Coindesk noted, the offering could pose a competitive threat to startups building similar yet more decentralized marketplaces. Others such as Motherboard said the idea of Amazon identifying bitcoin users for police is no doubt a worrying thought for privacy-obsessed cryptocurrency fans.
Image: Amazon/USPTO
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