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Invisibletdubz
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Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain
    #23785289 - 10/30/16 12:26 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/weed-strain-bitcoin-blockchain

When you walk into a dispensary in any one of the 25 states where medicinal and/or recreational marijuana is legal, you’ll likely see display cases lined with a dozen or more strains of weed. Many of these strains, like Pineapple Express or Blue Dream, will sound familiar, but is the Granddaddy Purp you buy in Colorado the same stuff your guy in California is selling you?

To answer this question, a company called Medicinal Genomics is creating a repository of cannabis genomes which are stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. The company hopes that its efforts will standardize strain nomenclature so that customers always know what they’re getting while also defending the intellectual property rights of those who breed new strains of weed.

Medicinal Genomics is a lot like any other cannabis testing company, insofar as they run tests on marijuana plants to look for microbial contaminations and determine their cannabinoid content to help marijuana cultivators comply with state regulations. Yet what sets this company apart is that their labs are also offering customers the ability to sequence the genome of their cannabis plants.

Hundreds of strains of cannabis exist and cultivators are working on breeding new strains all the time. In many cases, what sets these strains apart can be difficult to tell with a glance and a sniff—to really see the difference between them, you need to look at the DNA of the plant. Long before the rise of industrial cannabis, the name of the strain didn’t really matter. If your dealer was growing pot in his mom’s basement and told you that your buds were OG Kush, then that’s what they were—who cares if you were actually getting Girl Scout Cookies as long as it got you stoned.

But now that marijuana is becoming a regulated industry (at least on the state level), the name of a strain of weed is starting to matter: not only have we turned into a generation of pot snobs, but making sure a strain has consistent qualities is also crucial to its effectiveness as a medicine.

As a result, large growers are beginning to think about securing intellectual property rights for their strains, which became a possibility in August 2015 when the first patent for a strain of weed was filed at the US Patent Office. In response to this development, Medicinal Genomics saw an opportunity: it could assuage the fallout from the looming legal battle over strain ownership by allowing customers to register their strains on the Bitcoin blockchain.

For $600, growers can now buy a DNA purification kit for one of their plants and ship the genetic material to one of Medicinal Genomics partner labs for sequencing. Once the sequencing is done, scientists at Medical Genomics will compare the strain’s genome to a reference strain—in their case, this is Purple Kush—and record its genetic deviations from this reference to differentiate it as a unique strain.

Once the genotype of a grower’s plant has been determined, the scientists create a file documenting the unique properties of that strain and then runs that file through a cryptographic hash algorithm which scrambles the file’s information and produces a random string of numbers and letters known as a hashsum, or fingerprint, for the file.

This hashsum representing the file which contains the strain genotype is then tacked on to a Bitcoin transaction (the Bitcoin protocol allows for small amounts of information to be added to a transaction). What this does, effectively, is allow the owner of the strain to have an immutable, publicly accessible time-stamped record claiming their ownership of the strain. If another grower were to claim IP rights for the same strain, the original grower can point to the strain’s block on the Bitcoin blockchain as proof that they had been growing this strain before.

Although many institutions from banks to national governments are developing their own proprietary blockchains as repositories of sensitive information, for Medicinal Genomics it made more sense to integrate the company’s work into Bitcoin rather than trying to create a blockchain solely for strains it had sequenced.

“The Bitcoin blockchain has been going since 2009 and it’s security is in its proof of work,” said Kevin McKernan, Medicinal Genomics’ Chief Science Officer and a member of the Human Genome Project’s R&D team. “If you're dealing with customers' intellectual property and you're putting it in some side chain that you're supporting, if your network goes down and you don't manage that well, then you've let them all down.”

As might be expected, Medicinal Genomics has sparked a race among growers to sequence their strains and register them on the blockchain. While this is not the same thing as getting a patent from the US Patent Office for that strain and thus having IP rights for that strain, it does protect that grower in the event that someone else files a patent for that particular strain. In that case, the grower with their strain registered on the blockchain would be protected from an IP-violation lawsuit by whoever filed the patent through previous use exemption rights.

Medicinal Genomics currently has about 1000 strains registered on the blockchain, approximately 420 of which are publicly accessible through the company’s genomic repository, KannaPedia. Yet McKernan’s blockchain-powered cannabis genomics project is about more than avoiding lawsuits and enabling effective branding for growers who want you to know that their Green Crack is actually Green Crack.

Ultimately it’s a biological history project on a grand scale, which seeks to plot out cannabis’ evolutionary history while facilitating and mapping the rapid development of new strains. Despite the unprecedented rise of industrial cannabis in the last few years, the plant’s future on a global scale is far from certain. By putting this information in a decentralized, public ledger, McKernan and his colleagues are making sure that their dank genomics will never be lost.

“If for any reason we ever got shut down, all the people in the community that have the sequence files we gave them and could recreate our database,” McKernan told Motherboard. “I think that's important for the cannabis field. If we ever want to figure out the mitochondrial Eve of cannabis, it can't exist in a centralized database under one company's control.”


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Offlinerider420
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: tdubz]
    #23785450 - 10/30/16 01:14 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

ROLMFAO you can't patent a plant.

Morons will buy anything and con men will sell you shit!

FYI the only patent you can get with plants is if you modify the DNA then they are GMOs genetically engineered organisms.


Edited by rider420 (10/30/16 01:18 PM)


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: rider420]
    #23785638 - 10/30/16 02:17 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

rider420 said:
ROLMFAO you can't patent a plant.

Morons will buy anything and con men will sell you shit!

FYI the only patent you can get with plants is if you modify the DNA then they are GMOs genetically engineered organisms.





You are absolutely wrong rider420. You can patent plants bred and not found in the wild. Traditional cross-breeding is a type of genetic modification. People use the term 'GMO' these days to refer to plants bred using transgenics or epigenics. But that is an improper restriction of the term.


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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23785858 - 10/30/16 03:18 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

eeso said:
Traditional cross-breeding is a type of genetic modification.




That is 100% NOT true. Look up the definition of genetic modification again.


Either way, I don't need anyone to tell me if the strain I'm buying is what they say it is. Most strains are very distinct and easy to tell apart.


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Offlinerider420
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso] * 1
    #23785916 - 10/30/16 03:31 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

eeso said:

You are absolutely wrong rider420. You can patent plants bred and not found in the wild. Traditional cross-breeding is a type of genetic modification. People use the term 'GMO' these days to refer to plants bred using transgenics or epigenics. But that is an improper restriction of the term.




But this con has nothing to do with a real patent.

For $600, growers can now buy a DNA purification kit for one of their plants and ship the genetic material to one of Medicinal Genomics partner labs for sequencing. Once the sequencing is done, scientists at Medical Genomics will compare the strain’s genome to a reference strain—in their case, this is Purple Kush—and record its genetic deviations from this reference to differentiate it as a unique strain.


Spending 600 bucks to pretend to patent your weed is a waste of money!

FYI In order to acquire a plant patent, the inventor must have actually asexually reproduced the plant. Asexual reproduction means that the plant is reproduced by means other than seeds, usually accomplished by cutting or grafting of the plant. Asexual reproduction is the cornerstone of plant patents because that is what proves that the inventor (or discoverer) can duplicate the plant. The patented plant also must be novel and distinctive. For example, consider the Smooth Angel rose plant, patented by Henry Davidson of Orinda, California. It is described as follows in its patent.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/plant-patents.html

I admit I was wrong you can patent these plants if they were legal and if its a provable new strain and if you clone it, however given the breeding that has already occurred and its diversity odds are no judge is going to give anyone rights to any of the existing strains.


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D] * 1
    #23785953 - 10/30/16 03:40 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)



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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23785960 - 10/30/16 03:42 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

How cute. Not sure why we should take that seriously, but cute.


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23785973 - 10/30/16 03:45 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Why one should take what seriously? The image? Would you explain?


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23785978 - 10/30/16 03:46 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)



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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23785984 - 10/30/16 03:47 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Yes, the random image you posted, why should I take that seriously? I have no idea where you got it or what point you are trying to make with it.

Cross-breeding is simply cross-pollination, which occurs naturally. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it.


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23785993 - 10/30/16 03:50 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Kevin Folta made it.
Quote:


Kevin M. Folta is a professor and chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida.




Hybridization is done by cross-pollination. Which is modifying the genome passed to the child plant.

Did you read the last link I posted?


Edited by eeso (10/30/16 03:51 PM)


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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23785995 - 10/30/16 03:51 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

GMO is a term that was recently invented and applies to a very specific practice. For people to come in later and say that IN THEIR OPINION cross-breeding qualifies as genetic modification is fallacious and irrelevant.


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23786011 - 10/30/16 03:56 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

From the Genetic Literacy Project link I posted because you probably didn't read it:

Quote:

“But hybridization is not genetic modification!,” one woman commented to me on a Facebook thread following a comment that I had made explaining that our ancestors have been modifying plants genetically since Neolithic times.

I started to tell her that new plants made this way are GMOs. Indeed, they’re more GMO than the GMOs that are made with modern genetic engineering, since during hybridization numerous genes — hundreds or thousands — are moved among organisms, as opposed to just one or two very carefully selected genes. In the words of technology commentator Robert X. Cringley on the PBS program POV, “Hybridization is just crude genetic engineering”.

Crude means that tinkerers–farmers or scientists — don’t know which genes you’re moving, nor what they do. That may sound dangerous, but then nature does it all the time. All of life is genetically modified. That’s why we exist. Since the emergence of the the ribosome and the Genetic Code in the first cells, life forms have been genetically modified, for billions of years by nature, and then for the last eleven thousand years, a few species by intervention of our ancestors.




That's why I said that 'GMO' as used commonly today is used with an incorrectly limited definition.


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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23786018 - 10/30/16 03:57 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

I read it, and I responded. I guess you failed to understand.


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OfflineMorel Guy
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23786030 - 10/30/16 04:01 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Once seeds or clones make their rounds ya no longer own it.  Someone is always going to discover the next fad strain/variety.

If you want to own a specific variety or cut ya gotta not pass out the seeds or a single clone.  Not so much as one seed in all the flowers, not even a hermie.


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In filth it will be found in dung it will be found


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D] * 1
    #23786044 - 10/30/16 04:04 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

You're the one that is failing to understand. That 'Just an "opinion"' in the article who's author you're writing off was written by David Warmflash.
Quote:

David is an astrobiologist and science writer. He received his M.D. from Tel Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine, and has done post doctoral work at Brandeis University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Johnson Space Center, where he was part of the NASA's first cohort of astrobiology training fellows. He has been involved in science outreach for more than a decade and since 2002 has collaborated with The Planetary Society on studying the effects of the space environment on small organisms.



What's your credentials?


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Morel Guy]
    #23786053 - 10/30/16 04:06 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Morel Guy said:
Once seeds or clones make their rounds ya no longer own it.  Someone is always going to discover the next fad strain/variety.

If you want to own a specific variety or cut ya gotta not pass out the seeds or a single clone.  Not so much as one seed in all the flowers, not even a hermie.




Yes, you no longer have a lock on it pragmatically if a seed or a clone gets out - but OP article is talking legally.


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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: eeso]
    #23786091 - 10/30/16 04:15 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

I understand exactly what he is saying, and I can see how it makes sense. But I still disagree.

I'm not sure what being an astrobiologist has to do with anything. I have a degree in agriculture, specifically plant science, but I'm not going to pretend it means anything. Knowledge isn't limited to college.


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InvisibleRan-D
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23786092 - 10/30/16 04:15 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Matter of fact, I have learned way more on my own time than I ever did in school.


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Invisibleeeso
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Re: Weed Growers Are Racing to Register Their Strains on the Bitcoin Blockchain [Re: Ran-D]
    #23786093 - 10/30/16 04:16 PM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Ran-D said:
Quote:

eeso said:
Traditional cross-breeding is a type of genetic modification.




That is 100% NOT true. Look up the definition of genetic modification again.


Either way, I don't need anyone to tell me if the strain I'm buying is what they say it is. Most strains are very distinct and easy to tell apart.




Maybe you don't need anyone to tell you what strain you're smoking is; but subjective effects is not a specifically accurate way to deduce what strain you're smoking.


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