Mastercard Applies For New Patent for Anonymous Blockchain Transactions – A Regulated Bi…

Mastercard, the company who have gone through the entire process of laughing, fighting, and then embracing Bitcoin (and then attacking it again), have applied for another new patent in the blockchain space. Their last one was in regards to — we’re not making this up — a fractional reserve crypto bank. They describe a novel method of anonymizing transactions which does not, in function, represent those in place by Monero or other privacy coins.

Instead, the method described sounds a lot like coin mixing, a service that various businesses in the community have offered for years.

For those who are not aware, coin mixing (also called tumbling) is the process of taking a lot of different inputs, from senders, tumbling them together like a washing machine, and pushing out new transactions from the recipient address – thus obsfuscating the original source of the funds.

There are multiple methods of tumbling bitcoins. Mixing coins or tumbling them is no more illegal than…