Author: Pieter Wuille 2011-12-16 08:35:38
Published on: 2011-12-16T08:35:38+00:00
In December 2011, Pieter Wuille, a Bitcoin developer, expressed his views on using base58 strings for addresses which he deemed not flexible and not human-friendly. He proposed the use of URLs as address identifiers, optionally suffixed with a Bitcoin address for authentication. For example, his "address" would be either "sipa.be/pw.btc" or "sipa.be/pw.btc$14TYdpodQQDKVgvUUcpaMzjJwhQ4KYsipa" (where "https://") is an implicit default. Initiating a payment to either of these would result in a GET of https://sipa.be/pw.btc. When a transaction is constructed, it is POSTed back to that URL. Pieter commented on several options, including an IP transactions-like system with DNS resolution, an HTTPS web service, user at hostname-like identifiers, and DNS TXT lookups. Pieter suggested that the responsibility of getting the transaction accepted by the network should move from the sender to the receiver, who actually cares about getting their money. This could be achieved through an IP transactions-like system with DNS resolution, which gives nice identifiers. An alternative option is an HTTPS web service that provides the Bitcoin address to be used in the transaction to a client that queries a URL, immediately making the identifier double as a clickable URL. A merchant could add metadata to the URL to make the transaction easily trackable. Regarding user at hostname-like identifiers, Pieter believed they were only useful for one purpose: user-to-user payments. For anything somewhat more business-y, he thought it was better to use a clickable URL and hide all address information entirely from the user. He was not convinced about the hardcoding of the "https://" and "/bitcoin-alias/?handle=" parts but thought that if there was an HTTPS-based variant of a Bitcoin IP transactions-like system, the proposed "account" parameter to checkorder would probably become a CGI parameter. Pieter did not entirely oppose DNS TXT lookups but believed that only allowing a fixed Bitcoin address to be returned would far too strongly encourage the use of fixed addresses in transactions. If anything, it should be an identifier for one of the other proposals (which do allow interaction or at least creation of a fresh Bitcoin address) that is returned. To conclude, he suggested using URLs as address identifiers, optionally suffixed with a Bitcoin address for authentication.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T22:29:37.880408+00:00