Just saw this patent (released 03-2022) by Wells Fargo NA,

which mentions DLT and dr. Leemon Baird’s patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11265176B1/en?inventor=Leemon+Baird&sort=new#patentCitations. The patent concerns a system and applications to provide anonymous feedback. Interesting part: “Digital certificates are used by business and organizations to authenticate the identities of devices, employees, business partners, and regulators. Cryptographic keys associated with digital certificates may be used to sign ordinary email, create electronic signatures that comply with ESIGN and Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) requirements, sign transactions or smart contracts in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) environments, or enable entity authentication.” Curious to see what comes out, Wells Fargo NA is listed rank 41 within the Fortune 500 and is the third largest bank in the US by assets (https://fortune.com/company/wells-fargo/fortune500/).

Interesting...if you click through to the Swirlds patent referenced in this Wells Fargo patent...you find a patent for a means of signing a hash of the state of the DLT based on a specific transaction....this is a patent for the "state proof" that Leemon has talked about since Hedera18 conference in 2018...and indeed the patent for it was submitted in 2018. What it allows is for a specific transaction to be deleted from the DLT after a state proof established for it. What the Wells Fargo patent tells us is that this makes Hedera usable by companies who want to comply with European online privacy laws which require the ability to delete references. Also of interest is that the patent incorporates both in its own text as well as an appendix which is stated to be included in this patent is the original hashgraph patent. The hashgraph algorithm has been open sourced but that does not mean that Swirlds has relinquished its IP claim on hashgraph (generally open source is not a relinquishment of IP but just a kind of open license that still has certain requirements for attribution)...so any patent built upon hashgraph is itself non-open IP and reinforces Swirlds claim to the original IP that has been open sourced. It means that in practice, beyond the core Hedera services which have been open sourced, all the improvements or extensions of the platform are still patented. In this case the specific ability to delete a transaction from the DLT in exchange for a state proof is huge. The idea of an Immutable ledger going back to Genesis is a blockchain fetish that has been superseded by Hashgraph finality and the concept of the state proof. Other projects don't get that in order to comply with European law (and California law) you have to provide the ability to remove information from public record. Only Hedera can provide this quality. Presumably the implication is that public mirror nodes will be required to remove records upon request and be liable to legal action if they don't. So @Liebenfiels concern with an integral history going back to the original minting transaction is not in Hedera's model and it is likely that the legal system will actually require not a comprehensive history of all transactions but rather the ability to delete transactions. Any system lacking finality and therefor dependent on a full record of the whole chain will be in violation of this law. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11265176B1/en

Legal sytem is other way around for now, consensus doesn't have anything to do with it. It is all about to prove existence of transactions history. If you sign a 30 years contract and only evidence is a signed receipt you download at time, and no record on ledger will ever exists. Birt certificates are kept, if you lose they issue new one. If you lose mortgage contract doesn't mean, you don't have to pay anymore. It will not work like that. Chronicles were written and tracked many aspects and including population, for centuries. Nobody delete that, you can track your ancestors centuries to the past. It takes time & resources but can be done. Lack of tx history is only good for bad actors, to wipe out history of their illicit activities.

Hedera is proposing that a state proof is equivalent to the original signed paper copy of a legal contract and that the ledger history is redundant.

Having a hash and the data stored on a database is not secure since the original data files can be lost/deleeted/stolen by hackers. Taekion stores the entire file on chain if you want critical data protection. For most, its enough but hash alone is not for critical data. The market does not know this yet.

Then they will be teached how to do it professionally, and will be done for them. Other network has plan already, once they finish with Ethereum, then they will archive Hedera tx immutable. How wonderful they are.

Thank you so much for your extensive and detailed message, Crypto Consciousness! Appreciate your view on the matter and you made things more clear to me. Interested to see what this is bringing us in the future. Keep it up and I wish you a beautiful day! 🙂

Agreed, I must admit I love how detailed and articulate he is.

100%, I love that honestly. Always enjoy reading your pieces @Crypt0C0nsci0usness!

Plus amazingly well informed!!

Well... @Liebenfiels might yet be right about the need for a full storage of the entire transaction history...we don't know how this will all play out

Isn’t that what filecoin is helping us with?

Well the mirror nodes do this but Michal argues that they are invalid because they do not go back to the mint transaction in 2018 only to August 2019 a month or so before OA but it is possible Hedera retains a private mirror node back to original mint transaction.

You can’t store full data sets on Ethereum from a cost perspective.