"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> writes: >>> The Haber & Stornetta scheme provides a timestamping >>> service that doesn't require terribly much trust, >>> since hard to forge widely witnessed events delimit >>> particular sets of timestamps. The only issue is >>> getting sufficient granularity. > >> I don't know if their scheme was patented in Germany. >> It was in the U.S., though I think that at least some >> of the patents expire within the year. > > In looking this up, I have noticed a pile of patents > that patent something equivalent or near equivalent to a > patricia hash tree, or elaborately disguised patricia > trees, or something suspiciously similar to a patricia > hash tree, and various special cases of it, and > applications of it, without using the name "patricia > hash tree"
Perhaps that's because this is a Merkle tree, not a patricia tree. Patricia trees are radix trees -- they're used for optimizing routing tables, not in cryptography. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com