Payment Protocol for Face-to-face Payments



Summary:

Jeremy Spilman and Andreas Schildbach discussed the scan-to-pay feature in Bitcoin transactions, specifically QR-code payments. Schildbach estimated that at least 50% of Bitcoin transactions are initiated by a BIP21 URL encoded into a QR-code. He then encoded a payment request into the Bitcoin URL using his existing work on encoding transactions into QR-codes. Spilman inquired about the connectivity of the payer after scanning the QR code with the protobuf PaymentRequest. He suggested reusing existing infrastructure for serving the URL instead of using a QR-code. However, PaymentRequest-over-QR-code has an advantage of having a simpler and more intuitive authentication model for face-to-face transactions. The web case is fine to ignore the case where the URL domain has been subverted since it's dependent on SSL security. But the face-to-face case isn't intrinsically dependent on SSL security, and it's nice not to introduce that attack vector.


Updated on: 2023-06-08T01:10:31.912340+00:00