Blockchain company is granted a patent for a room-temperature superconductor | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain company is granted a patent for a room-temperature superconductor

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12 pointsdmitrybrant10 comments

In a nutshell, the patent describes hydrocarbon wetted graphene with regular holes punched through it as a type II superconductor.

Apparently Lockheed Martin patented, and can produce, the perforated graphene for water filtration, and the holes let the magnetic field lines escape without compromising the effective superconductivity of a wire.

...Yes, the word blockchain singularly and immediately increased my skepticism, as if any mention of graphene didn't already. But for what its worth, their website advertises some kind of communication app with quantum resistant encryption, not a cryptocurrency.

A communication app with quantum resistant encryption is easy. Just use Kyber in a hybrid mode with ECC for key exchange.

ECC is just defense in depth against Kyber having weaknesses because it’s new.

Ooh high temperature superconductors are in the news how can we work this into a crypto grift?

How much more efficient are superconducting mining rigs?

For sure, but it's a bit weirder than that: 1) They applied for the patent in 2021, long before the current hype coming from Korea. 2) The patent was officially granted by the Patent Office on pretty much the same day as the Korean preprints were uploaded. The patent is very clearly bunk, but the timing of the patent approval is an astronomical coincidence.

These happen a lot. Reality doesn't quite work like we think it does.

Why is the patent clearly bunk?

It seems to be based loosely on this preprint from 2018: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09376

...which was never peer-reviewed or reproduced. The authors of the patent are also not physicists, chemists, or materials-scientists, with no prior publications related to superconductors. This just came out of thin air.

If anything, this highlights everything that's wrong with the US patent system. (you don't need to have a working prototype to get it patented, and the patent examiner doesn't need to understand anything about the mechanism you're proposing.)

I see. So this one is probably a scam. Though they do claim to want to post a video of it working on monday... maybe there is a little bit of hope?

> [..] but the timing of the patent approval is an astronomical coincidence.

Is it, though? Patents for complete nonsense are granted all the time; it would not surprise me if room-temperature superconductor patents are actually quite common. If that's the case, one granted at about the same time as there's room temperature superconductor news will naturally get extra attention, no coincidence involved.

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