Author: Andreas Schildbach 2014-02-18 21:40:13
Published on: 2014-02-18T21:40:13+00:00
In an email conversation dated February 18th, 2014, Ryan X. Charles expressed his concern about the missing piece of the payment protocol which is the concept of the status of a payment after it has been made. He cited instances of regular occurrences at BitPay such as payments being too little or too much, not confirmed, and confirmed but very late. Charles suggested that a program capable of paying the exact amount should be developed to address these issues. Furthermore, he stated that X.509 is a terrible standard that should be abandoned as soon as possible. BitPay is working on a new standard based on bitcoin-like addresses for authentication which they aim to establish as a complete, decentralized authentication protocol with the help of the community. Regarding certificate chain in pki_data, Charles believes that it should contain the first certificate plus all intermediate certificates (if any), but not the root certificate. He noted that so long as the root certificate remains an optional addition, this seems like a good idea. In response to a question about TLS and PKI data, Charles clarified that they are not using TLS for PKI data since it's just a byte array. In conclusion, Charles suggested that times in the payment protocol should be required to be in UTC instead of local time zone to avoid confusion. A sentence about time zones in the specification was also recommended. More information on this conversation can be found on GitHub.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T03:04:34.995747+00:00