Author: Ryan X. Charles 2014-02-18 19:14:24
Published on: 2014-02-18T19:14:24+00:00
The author shares his thoughts on the payment protocol after working on the merchant side at BitPay. The most important missing piece of the payment protocol is that it has no concept of the status of a payment after it has been made. One way to handle this would be to add another type of message that can return the merchant's view of the status of the transaction(s). Wallets could check the status of a payment, and if anything goes wrong, request a refund, all within the payment protocol. The payment protocol is also an opportunity to implement merge avoidance to increase customer and merchant privacy. On an unrelated note, X.509 is a terrible standard that should be abandoned as quickly as possible. The author suggests working on a new standard based on bitcoin-like addresses for authentication. In addition, BitPay has proposed a new standard, BIP 73, for shorter URIs and less dense QR codes.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T03:02:01.197115+00:00