Author: Walter Stanish 2012-11-27 02:16:01
Published on: 2012-11-27T02:16:01+00:00
The proposal to standardize an invoicing protocol for Bitcoin has been met with some skepticism by Walter Stanish, who urges caution and review of existing protocols. He raises concerns about the scope of this proposal, which he thinks should be limited to settlement systems rather than tacking on business-level functions. Stanish also questions the use of X.509, given its recent security issues, and suggests open support with initial support for GPG instead. He points out that existing protocols in this area should be considered, including those used by hosted platforms such as Xero. Stanish is skeptical that the proposed invoicing protocol will be able to accommodate the complexity of metadata required by businesses operating at scale. Moreover, he points out that non-BTC currencies are not addressed in this proposal, making it of limited utility for almost all businesses. Finally, Stanish cautions against using DNS, which he considers a potential source of vulnerability and information leakage. Stanish suggests that Bitcoin developer time would be better spent improving the core of bitcoin rather than adding new features like invoicing. Instead, he invites parties within the Bitcoin community with an interest in non-directly settlement-linked financial transaction negotiation and reporting features to consider contributing to the existing, re-usable efforts at the Internet Financial Exchange Project (IFEX). IFEX's proposals include X-ISO4217-A3, Internet IBAN (IIBAN), Internet MIC (IMIC), and Internet Financial EXchange (IFEX).
Updated on: 2023-06-06T08:46:24.790924+00:00