U.S. Patent 10764325 was awarded to KONICA MINOLTA LABORATORY U.S.A., INC. on September 01, 2020 and is entitled “Method for adjusting mining difficulty of a cryptocurrency blockchain system by monitoring malicious forks and implementing a miners blockchain.” The first named inventor is Rahul Suraparaju of Fremont, CA. The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

A modified mining algorithm of the conventional bitcoin system adopts, during some periods of time, a lower difficulty for proof-of-work (PoW) than the default difficulty of the conventional bitcoin system, while implementing a malicious fork detection mechanism to monitor the bitcoin blockchain during periods of reduced difficulty. The malicious fork detection mechanism detects and removes malicious forks, the malicious forks being recognizes where every block on a forked branch was generated by the same miner. If a malicious fork is found, the mining difficulty is increased back to the default value for a period of time. The default difficulty corresponds to 2016 blocks every 14 days, while the reduced difficulty corresponds to 2016 blocks every 10 days. A miners’ blockchain is implemented to allow the miners to reach consensus regarding the detection of malicious forks. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on March 30, 2018  as U.S. Patent Application 15/942331 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10764325. The primary examiner was Edward Zee.

KONICA MINOLTA LABORATORY U.S.A., INC., who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 441 total granted patents in the United States as of the date of this article. This blockchain patent has been cited 0 times by other U.S. patents according to our law firm research, and can be considered an innovative patent in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

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