A Tale of Two Patents: Kravitz v Schnorr
I know of the importance of protecting IP, and we have patented our research work for each of our spin-outs. But I find our existing patent infrastructure is archaic. Often, too, a patent can suppress the adoption of amazing methods. This happened with Claus Schnorr, and where the development of his method was suppressed, but where a method defined by David W. Kravitz advanced to become a global standard for digital signatures.
Schnorr
In Feb 1989, Claus Schnorr submitted a patent which was assigned to no one. It has 11 claims and allowed digital signatures to be merged for multiple signers [here]:
This method has the great advantage that we can have multiple signers to a message or a transaction and end up with a single signature for all the signers. It is now being used in Bitcoin transactions so that we have an efficient signature for a transaction that involves multiple entities.
With the Schnorr signature, we create a signature (R,s) for a hash of the message (m). Initially, Peggy (the prover) has a private key x, and her public key will then be:
