Hold the presses – is Microsoft getting into the cryptocurrency world with both feet?
Sheldon Reback at Coindesk reports Microsoft getting a patent for a “ledger-independent system” to make it easier to manage tokens and coins across different platforms.
The company promotes more standardization with blockchains and a common interface, as part of evolving how fintech treats blockchain systems.
“On receiving a request from a user, the system offers templates with various attributes and control functions,” Reback writes. “Those would depend on the type of token required, representing, for example, a digital or physical asset. Once the user has selected the desired template, the system creates the token on the designated networks. The system also provides a common interface for managing the tokens, so developers don’t have to worry about token-specific code to interact with them.”
That’s all very impressive, but a bigger signal to the world of BTC investors may revolve around a thoroughly different patent also being pursued by the same tech giant.
“In a patent application filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (Microsoft) said sensors could detect activity associated with specific tasks – such as time spent viewing ads – and convert it into computer-readable data to solve computational problems, in much the same way as a conventional proof-of-work system,” wrote Paddy Baker for the same publication in March.
This was big news at the time, and still is, because so much of the negative push around BTC in past weeks has to do with the coin’s energy-intensive mining practices.
If planners can actually mine Bitcoin with human body heat, the coin’s eco-problems may soon be over.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new plan to provide cross-ledger services could conceivably do for crypto trading what Microsoft Windows did for user OS: and if so, we’re going to see even more consolidation across a handful of top tech stocks that comprise more and more of the entire American market.
Think about this as you make your crypto plays.
