Author: Andy Schroder 2015-02-05 23:38:17
Published on: 2015-02-05T23:38:17+00:00
The email discusses two proposed BIPs that focus on implementing the payment protocol using Bluetooth connections. The author believes that Bluetooth communication is critical due to the potential lack of internet access at many points of sale. One of the proposals saw little discussion last fall, and the author questions why another Bluetooth communication proposal has been created by Airbitz. The NFC coupled approach seems to avoid a lot of issues with identifying the correct payee. The author would like to see something happen with this technology and suggests that more improvements to the payment protocol can simultaneously result that embrace the establishment of micropayment channels. Since the original announcement, a few improvements have been made to the proposal, including improved documentation and explanation of the use cases in Schildbach's wallet's wiki, and an issue with the payment_url field has resolved by changing it to a repeated field and requiring the wallet to search for the protocol they want to use.Although there are some interesting use cases of Airbitz's proposal's work flow, tapping an NFC radio with a 5 mm range requires much less brain power and time than picking the correct name on the app's screen. The manual name picking is going to be especially crazy in a very congested location. The payer isn't ever going to want to have to try and figure out what register or payment terminal they are at for most applications the author would ever use.There are a few known issues that could be improved to this Bluetooth communication scheme as well as the general payment protocol, and the author would like to receive feedback regarding concerns and potential solutions. Some of the known issues include inconsistency in the connection header messages between the payment request connection and the payment connection, unauthenticated Bluetooth connection for Bluetooth 2.1 and newer devices, no acknowledgement failure message possible in the payment protocol, amount of data stored in QR codes getting large when a backwards compatible URL is used, and the number of offline transactions of a wallet is limited to the known unspent outputs when they go offline.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T03:11:58.693680+00:00