Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-05-09 15:50:33
Published on: 2014-05-09T15:50:33+00:00
The author of this post believes that stealth addresses and payment protocol have different use cases, and they do not overlap. If you do not want to communicate with the receiver, anonymous donations could be a perfect solution because it allows you to pay without revealing your identity. In other cases, communication between the sender and receiver has its advantages, such as negotiation of transaction details, messages associated with the transaction, refund information, no need to scan the blockchain for incoming transactions, and the ability to cancel if either party doesn't agree.Instead of adding stealth functionality to the payment protocol as a last resort, the author suggests improving atomicity. The data channel sender->receiver must either be available or unavailable. If it is not available, and you want it, things should fail. If you do not want it, you should not try to use it in the first place.In response to Mike Hearn's suggestion about getting atomicity in the worst-case where the communications medium fails and stealth payments that use no extra space in the blockchain, the author wants to know how a lightweight client can identify such transactions without any markers. Regardless, there are many useful features that require BIP70 to work well person-to-person, like messages, refund addresses, etc. So extending it with ECDH makes sense in the end anyway, regardless of what happens.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:51:28.438134+00:00