From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net>
To: Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil•org>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>,
Andreas Schildbach <andreas@schildbach•de>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Two Proposed BIPs - Bluetooth Communication and bitcoin: URI Scheme Improvements
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2015 14:54:49 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANEZrP23tfTzCfk2eXUOPX=CFCg6GKn4HO5Rb3ZxeOJQtEQCHw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <54D482B8.9070108@voskuil.org>
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BLE meets a different use case than regular Bluetooth. BLE is designed to
allow always-on broadcast "beacons" which are conceptually similar to NFC
tags, with very low power requirements. The tradeoff for this ultra-low
power consumption and always on nature is the same as with NFC tags: you
get very little space for data, and they are essentially one way. That's
why a common use case for it is to trigger some other mechanism like a
classical Bluetooth socket or HTTPS connection.
I think BLE has a role to play in Bitcoin payments, but probably not for
actually transferring payment data. Rather, a merchant should be able to
drop a BLE beacon in their shop, and then wallet apps can use that to learn
where to download a payment request/upload a payment message. But the
actual data transfer would still take place over Bluetooth, Wifi or the
internet.
That leads to the question of what the beacon broadcasts. A bitcoin URI is
the obvious answer: the problem is a URI contains an address. No problem
for the "throw money at a live performer" use case but a problem for the
cafe use case. If we are willing to mandate BIP70 and remove the static
address part from the URI the we get a "uri that points to a url" which is
a bit inefficient but at least lets us distinguish bitcoin beacons from
other kinds. That still leaves the fundamental question raised by the
Airbitz spec - how does your wallet download the right payment request?
Unfortunately that's a tough UI problem. I don't think comparing long hex
strings manually is a good way to go. This seems less user friendly than a
QR code.
Once we solve that problem, how BLE beacons can trigger payments will all
fall into place. The tech part isn't the hard part.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2015-02-06 13:54 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-10-17 19:58 Andy Schroder
2014-10-20 12:50 ` Mike Hearn
2014-10-20 15:12 ` Andy Schroder
2014-10-20 16:29 ` Mike Hearn
2014-10-22 16:01 ` Justus Ranvier
2015-02-05 23:38 ` Andy Schroder
2015-02-06 0:36 ` Eric Voskuil
2015-02-06 1:40 ` Andy Schroder
2015-02-06 2:14 ` Eric Voskuil
2015-02-06 8:53 ` Andreas Schildbach
2015-02-06 13:57 ` Mike Hearn
2015-02-06 8:40 ` Andreas Schildbach
2015-02-06 9:00 ` Eric Voskuil
2015-02-06 13:54 ` Mike Hearn [this message]
2015-02-06 19:06 ` Peter D. Gray
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