Cisco announces new patent: can be used for Bitcoin mining

According to Coindesk, on Tuesday, network technology giant Cisco announced that it had obtained a patent that can be used for Bitcoin mining.

The patent outlines how computer users could use unused processing power to power certain processes, including energy-intensive mining. The patent also describes how users could use their resources to build dedicated computing power for cloud applications.

Cisco is a leading global network solutions provider, known for its computer hardware, and the profits of some of its core products have shown a slow and steady decline. The company began to deploy blockchain in its early stages and is one of the first members of the blockchain alliance "Hyperledger" led by the Linux Foundation, and is also a member of the International Blockchain Council.

In December 2017, Cisco also submitted a patent application, which showed that Cisco was studying blockchain technology. The application described how blockchain can enable people to spontaneously form teams and share files and other information while recording membership. Because the dynamic, decentralized and self-built groups where instant messaging teams are located often encounter the problem of member information being tampered with, Cisco hopes to use the advantages of blockchain technology to provide solutions to ensure that group member information is securely created, updated and maintained.

Cisco provides a confidential group authorization solution, where the data blocks in the group are arranged in order, and the device of the first group participant creates the "Genesis" block. As each other session member joins, they will also generate their own blocks. All of these blocks store group member information, and the information cannot be tampered with. In fact, Cisco's patented blockchain technology has many use cases that can meet end-to-end encryption of real-time information, streaming media, and shared content, helping developers to more easily implement group communication protocols and applications.

Cisco has previously submitted a blockchain patent that uses a distributed network to track IoT devices.