Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Payment Protocol Proposal: Invoices/Payments/Receipts

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:44:41 +0100

Luke-Jr - common subset of what operating systems ship is fine for me
as long as people do due diligence around mobile OS' here. It seems
easier to me to just grab a list from a popular browser, on the
grounds that SSL is mostly used by them so nobody is going to buy an
SSL cert rejected by IE/Firefox/Chrome/etc. But intersecting OS lists
is effectively the same.

For my own clients I'd just ship my own copy of the canonical CA certs
regardless, because integrating with each operating systems
proprietary crypto APIs is a lot of work vs just loading a pem file
into OpenSSL. If there are a lot of people who want to use the OS cert
management UIs then I guess that can be a point wallet clients compete
on.

> Removing that and adding a opaque string called domain name, or
> identityName would be sufficient to move the conversation forward
> without the x.509 baggage.

But it would result in implementations that do not meet the requirements.

Yes, X.509 has problems. It's in the proposal because we can get the
effect we want (verifiable domain names in the UI) in about 50 lines
of code, today, with the id-verified keys people actually have already
bought.

As Gavin says, we can add optional fields later to extend the protocol
in a backwards compatible way.