CME Group to patent new blockchain technologies allowing changes without consensus

The website of the United States Patent and Trademark office now has a new patent request sent by CME Group, a regular exchange which has launched irregular futures contracts connceted with Bitcoin not so long ago, which has been met by some conservative market members with skepticism.

The patent filing tells about a new blockchain which remarkably allows to change information in the distributed ledger without the consent of all other network participants, unless, of course, the major media outlets understood it incorrectly. The rule change described in the paper is needed so that no new forks, or independent blockchains, emerged.

“Rule changes are difficult to achieve, and doing so requires both near unanimous consensus as well as near universal software updates to prevent the above described types of fork scenarios“, the CME blockchain inventors note.

This technology takes out one of the key blockchain advantages - information is pristine unless all parties agree to change it, but in some structures it may prove useful. As the authors of the filing note, it might come in handy in the sphere of airline miles.