Author: Matt Corallo 2012-01-31 16:04:59
Published on: 2012-01-31T16:04:59+00:00
Amir Taaki, a Bitcoin developer, expressed his concerns about BIP 20 and its lack of support in major implementations like Bitcoin-Qt, Electrum, MultiBit, and Bitcoin-JS. He also mentioned that the opinion of these GUI projects carries the most weight as they have some form of URI Scheme. However, Bitcoin-Qt has the majority of users, but Amir discouraged using this as a line of reasoning. Although normally it would be best to reject BIP 21 and submit a new standard, since BIP 21 is largely a copy-paste of BIP 20 with some sections removed, and it is still a draft, the best approach would be to agree on something and run it by BlueMatt to make it the new BIP 21. A consensus seems to be forming on most parts except for the contentious issue of sending private keys and adding a time to expire field for merchants.BIP 20 is problematic because it's incompatible with almost every web standard, including HTML and URI, which all use decimal numbers alone. Breaking with tradition isn't necessary, and there's no reason to do so. Amir also mentions that he would prefer if all code used a real international language like Esperanto, but this isn't the reality.In response to a comment from Matt, another Bitcoin developer, the send crap was not in the original spec, isn't implemented anywhere, and should have been removed during the BIP 21 copy/paste. He also expressed some concern about adding a field that restricts the validity of a URI for new clients while old clients will accept it, which could result in some ugly situations.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T23:02:15.966358+00:00