Bitcoin [BTC] can be processed via text messages, USTPO grants patent to Intuit Inc.

Intuit Inc., a California based company, has bagged a United States patent for processing Bitcoin through text messages. Intuit primarily markets financial, accounting, and tax development software and associated services for small businesses, accountants, and individual parties.

On 7th August, the U.S Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO] published the patent on its site. The patent explains how mobile phones will help process payments between two virtual accounts.

As the filing cites:

“A method for processing payment. The method includes receiving, by a payment service, a payment text message comprising a payment amount and an identifier of a payee mobile device.”

The company initially filed the patent on 13th January 2014.  Earlier, the company launched QuickBooks service before it moved on to file the patent.

Intuit claimed QuickBooks service helps small enterprises to accept risk-free Bitcoin payments without the use of Bitcoin wallets.

They said:

“We came up with an innovative way to enable small businesses to accept Bitcoin payments without any risk or a bitcoin wallet,”

According to the patent, the application will comprise of a GUI. The paper further explains the numerous ways through which the payment validation can be done.

Users will be able to validate if sufficient balance is available in the payer’s account before the transaction. Another validation will authenticate the user by generating a unique One Time Password [OTP].

Moreover, the system will validate using voicemail – an unanswered phone call generated by the system. This will eliminate the incoming of malicious and unidentified messages, the patent cited.

Furthermore, the service will hold a wallet which includes P2P file sharing. As mentioned in the patent:

“master wallet comprises a peer-to-peer file sharing data structure assigned to the payment service for storing virtual currency of the payment service.”

Recently Intuit has partnered with payment vendor Veem to enable cross-border cryptocurrency payments.