IANA patent lawyer, but I am not sure this patent's claims would apply. It creates a sequence of the natural numbers and certificates for each number in the seq

IANA patent lawyer, but I am not sure this patent's claims would apply. It creates a sequence of the natural numbers and certificates for each number in the sequence. But the approach being outlined here doesn't rely on trustworthy sequential numbers at all. Put another way: this patent may cover some specific applications of Merkle trees to natural numbers, but doesn't cover all sequential data structures. For most purposes "happened-at" or "happens-before" relations are plenty useful and don't require sequence numbers to establish the relation.