Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Payment Protocol for Face-to-face Payments

From: Alex Kotenko <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 03:47:35 +0000

I know that general approach to interaction design in Bitcoin assumes
minimal to no difference between payer and payee, and generally I agree
with this approach.
However, for the sake of my PoS development this assumption is wrong by
default, as PoS is a specialized hardware, and one who cared to buy and
install it is probably not in the same situation as the other party that
didn't care to by anything dedicated.

In short - from PoS point of view there is a customer and a merchant. And
my goal is to make thing work in assumption of fast and reliable connection
on merchant side and no connection requirement at all from customer side.

I didn't put a silly example, as of my experience there are really a lot of
places where cellphone connection isn't good enough for reliable Bitcoin
operation. However, if we're talking about merchant establishments - we can
hope for private local WiFi or wired connection on PoS side, so PoS
internet connection shouldn't be an issue. So this is the use case I'm
designing around and this is why bluetooth based BIP70 implementation is
important for me.

I partly agree with Mike on user interface and IOU idea, but I have no
intention to implement anything like that right now.