Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-01-30 11:46:30
Published on: 2014-01-30T11:46:30+00:00
In an email exchange between Chuck and Mike Hearn, the discussion centered around changes to Bitcoin Core and bitcoinj. Mike stated that any changes made from this point on have to be backwards compatible. Chuck then expressed concern about failure situations and stressed the importance of addressing these issues now rather than trying to patch solutions later. He suggested that current Payment Protocol (PP) descriptions may be defunct or incomplete, making experience gained from the current implementation moot.Chuck cited a major hole in the implementation: delivery of the Payment message. A merchant could claim that they never received the message or a faulty network connection could prevent its delivery. Without retrying, the memo and refund address can't be relied upon, rendering them useless. Chuck proposed a solution to make the protocol more atomic, but acknowledged that it might be too radical at this stage. He called for the specification to do everything possible to prevent transactions from confirming without the payment message ever being delivered, such as storing them in the sender's client and using exponential backoff.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:04:19.226769+00:00