Author: Stephen Pair 2012-12-20 16:53:22
Published on: 2012-12-20T16:53:22+00:00
The author shared their thoughts and observations on a payments protocol proposal. The proposal was heavily oriented towards merchant/customer interaction, but the author noted that person to person scenarios should also be considered. They suggested that it would be useful if people could send/receive payments through copying and pasting on Facebook or email, with signed payment requests providing verification against an address book of known identities. The author also discussed various technical aspects of the proposal such as protobufs vs JSON, X.509, refund addresses, and the use of merchant_data. They proposed that bitcoin clients could manage one or more identities for communication purposes, which could be used for signing messages and verifying authenticity. They also suggested an optional memo feature for each output in the payment structure and the signing of receipts for proof of payment.In terms of backward compatibility, the author did not support tacking on a payment request URI to the current bitcoin URI, instead suggesting the use of the "pay" URI. They proposed including a link on invoices to display an old style bitcoin payment address. Overall, the author believed that identity management was an important issue to consider and could enable many interesting possibilities.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T08:41:00.267476+00:00