Author: Andy Schroder 2015-02-06 01:40:32
Published on: 2015-02-06T01:40:32+00:00
A proposed Bluetooth payment protocol implementation could be more secure with a lower range, according to a recent post on the bitcoin-development mailing list. The main advantage of BLE over BT is that it uses much less power, with a trade-off in lower bandwidth (100 kbps vs. 2 mbps). For payment purposes the lower bandwidth isn't much of a hit. The author tested the Bluetooth radio inside his metal cabinet and found that the range was around five metres which he deemed sufficient. However, the connection can be slow when the whole certificate chain is included (~3-4s), with much of this time spent verifying the signature.In the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Andy Schroder sought suggestions regarding how to update the payment_url parameter numbers in comparison to the bitcoin URL "r parameter." He proposed creating an additional new field called payment_url_multi, which could be repeated, and leaving the original payment_url field for backward compatibility while gradually phasing it out. The reference material cited in support of this proposal was from https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#updating. This page explains that optional is compatible with repeated and that serialized data of a repeated field as input will take the last input value if it's a primitive type field or merge all input elements if it's a message type field.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T03:14:10.799846+00:00