In a February 8, 2011 post on Bitcointalk, Finney said that reading a book titled “Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography” by Hankerson, Menezes, and Vanstone, gave him an idea of how to speed up signature verification by 25%. In the following post from the same day, Finney announced that he had already written “test code” and uploaded it to the Github repository. However, there was a problem with Finney’s proposal — his method had already been patented by someone else.
“Method for Accelerating Cryptographic Operation on Elliptic Curves” (also known as GLV or Four-Dimensional Gallant–Lambert–Vanstone Scalar Multiplication) received a patent on September 19, 2006 — likely at a time when Satoshi Nakamoto was already busy at work on Bitcoin (BTC). In order to understand the invention, we have to dive a bit deeper into elliptical curve cryptography. The patent reads: