Bitcoin Forum

https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/prov/bitcoin

(last updated 2012-09-23)

Resource Identifier (RI) Scheme name: bitcoin
Status: provisional

Scheme syntax:
   bitcoin:<address>[?[amount=<size>][&][label=<label>][&][message=<message>]]

Scheme semantics:
   Send money to a Bitcoin address

Encoding considerations:
   Unknown, use with care.

Applications/protocols that use this scheme name:

Interoperability considerations:
   Unknown, use with care.
   May be unsuitable for open use on the public internet.
Security considerations:
   Unknown, use with care.
   This scheme claims to be used to send money, which implies a commitment
   by the client user; as described is not clear that this scheme does not
   violate the web principle of safe interactions
   (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#safe-interaction). In the absence of more
   details, it should be considered very dangerous to dereference a bitcoin
   URI.
Contact:
   Registering party: Dave Thaler <dthaler&microsoft.com>
   Scheme creator: Bitcoin URI Scheme
Author/Change controller:
   Either the registering party or someone who is verified to represent
   the scheme creator.  See previous answer.
References:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0021  



(file created 2012-09-23)

URI = clickable links on a webpage that would open up your bitcoin client to send a payment, correct?

If so, it's neat that they recognize it!

Also, what does "dereference" mean in this context, and why is it very dangerous?

I could be dangerous just because a click pay system could be hijacked to send to the wrong address. Maybe?

I believe "dereference" means to follow the link. It would be dangerous because in theory (depending on what software you have installed) calling on the operating system / browser to open the URI may cause money to get sent from your wallet.

This works now if you have MultiBit or Armory.  It does not send funds from your wallet.  What it does is precompose a Send Bitcoins transaction with the amount and address from the link.  the buyer still has to press the SEND button. It is similar to a mailto: link on a webpage which precomposes an email using your registered email client.


I made 2 videos of this working, one with Multibit, the other with BitcoinSpinner on Android.

https://bitpay.com/faq (https://bitpay.com/faq)  (watch the "Pay from Computer" video)

also, this one, which will be updated on that webpage soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GY0UsfJ7s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GY0UsfJ7s)

The wallet software can register the URL protocol without any involvement from Microsoft.

If you'd like a few test links of the bitcoin: URI, look here:

http://lovebitcoins.org/developers.html (http://lovebitcoins.org/developers.html)

BitPay fully supports the bitcoin: URI protocol on our invoice pages.

We I've tried to click on existing bitcoin uri's it always fails because is tries to start another instance of my bitcoind even if it is already running on my windows box, so I never use it.  Is there a fix for this?

Wow, this is awesome. That is exactly what is needed to get Bitcoin wider adopted.

Sorry, but the direct handling of the addresses is something that scares away "average Joe" users.

If you could use BTC without ever seeing the addresses just by applications like this. A giant new marked opens.

That is exactly what we are working towards at BitPay.  eventually the bitcoin address will be invisible, just like all the IP headers and other things we used to have to deal with when sending emails.

This ^^ is what is needed! Cool.

does this mean that microsoft "own" the URI?

Quote from reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/117bxw/microsoft_registers_bitcoin_uri_scheme/):

BTW does stuff like this, i mean registering at various places. etc., is a job for Bitcoin Foundation?

I does mean they are thinking about it.  :-*

So you want friggin Bill Gates to be registering protocols? They have ppl for that, and this is the guy. :P

And now also on the Bitcoin-Qt client running on Windows (re-enabled with v0.7 of the Bitcoin.org GUI client)

only problem is if I already have 0.7.0 running, and I click a URI link, I get this error.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g296/tonygal/2012-09-25_0928.png

He didn't "register" it, he reported it.

It looks like Bitcoin has been on the radar of Microsoft's research group for awhile now. This was from back in June 2012:

On Bitcoin and Red Balloons

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=156072

Mind you microsoft research is a honeypot for comp-sci students created by Microsoft and not the actual Corporation.  ;)

What about implementing this URI scheme to actually work in the Client?

From the standpoint of privacy it would be better to have a URI that sends parameters for generating a set of BIP 32 public keys instead of a single address.

The URIs can be dynamic, just like all other content in the web.  It can be a different address on every page load, or order, or whatever.

So what is the impact to the BTC community? Are we about to see mainstream software companies accepting BTC as payments?

What BIP 32 can do is allow two entities to establish a payment channel that can have an arbitrary number of unique addresses with a single page load.

Of course that same webpage can also generate unique BIP 32 parameters on every page load.

No way. Even if they wanted to they wouldn't because the market cap of Bitcoin is too low and the liquidity is just not there. These companies deal in billions, not thousands. If they can't liquidate millions of dollars worth of BTC on a moments notice they won't touch it. Unless they wanted to use Bitcoin for some niche product/service.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/156072/bitcoin.pdf
 (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/156072/bitcoin.pdf)

The article does raise a very serious point (oversight) in the bitcoin protocol -- suppose I put a high transaction fee on my transaction because I want it verified quickly....and the first node that I send to (and let's say the only node I can connect to) see that high fee, why would that node send the transaction to other nodes rather than spend a few weeks trying to include it in a block that it solves itself (and hence collects the fee)?

Receiving nodes have no reason to forward transactions on, and in fact, have an incentive to not forward paying transactions.  That to me sounds like a big deal...you don't want each client to have to purposefully connect to thousands of nodes to broadcast transactions to get a decent confirmation time...that's not very p2p :)

Strange, I haven't heard of this problem playing out in practice.

Actually, there is a small incentive to forward transactions:

If you mine a block that contains a lot of transactions that have never been broadcast on the network, it will take your peers longer to verify that the signatures in the block are valid.*

So it takes your block longer to propagate through the network, which makes it slightly more likely to lose a block race.

---

* A couple of releases ago I implemented a signature cache, so if a node sees a transaction broadcast it doesn't have to re-check it when that transaction is part of a block.

Does this imply the existance of an optimum transaction fee which exactly balances the two incentives?

I doubt it would...there are like....uhh...no significant transaction fees...right?

addendum -- nothing compared to the block reward, that's for sure...

To be clear, this disincentive to not broadcast applies to mining nodes, right? Personally, I just run the Bitcoin qt client and have no reason to stop transactions from being broadcast.

I think that's really cool

yup..you're a good Bitcoin citizen

Yeah, yeah... The liquidity is not there because large companies are not yet using it.


Interesting... What do you mean by "liquidating" millions of dollars at a moment's notice? Hiding profits from auditors? Many companies deal with commodities that are far slower than Bitcoin, yet they somehow manage to work around that. For example, shipping companies cannot just magically liquidate their stock at a moment's notice.

On the other hand, if large companies are unable to use Bitcoin because of some fear that they'll be like an elephant in a china shop, that's their problem. Their incompetence is another's advantage.

 ;)

Just try writing even a simple budget etc using bitcoins as a unit of account.

Advertising: one billion.

Oops, wait, one billion bitcoins at current conversion rates?

Conversion rates seem broken, surely no amount of value when converted to bitcoin as unit of account should come out to more than 21 million bitcoins?

Or do we go ahead and write our budget of billions of bitcoins anyway then try to pump it all through the only 21 million bitcoins "pipe"? What kind of velocity is needed for billions to flow through an aperture only 21 millions wide?

Bitcoins need to be asigned much much much higher value to work as units of account.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin value isn't assigned, it is discovered.

And you can easily calculate your budget in bitcoin, even a billion of them, but if you try to actually spend a billion of them in a year, you will find out that your estimate of their value was wrong, and you will actually need many fewer of them than you expected.

That's why I'm pretty sure that as BTC get more and more adoption, by bigger and bigger companies, even a BIG enterprise who's willing to make it a try as a precusor, it will soon (few years), be traded as satoshi instead of BTC, because BTC will worth too much for the average joe to own/buy.  I'm preparing myself to calculate it as satoshi !  Those days may come sonner that we tought.. To date, BTC had a surprisingly fast pace of growth..  Used as Satoshi, BTC will have billions of units of value, that's would enable it to work as units of value !

I've bought fiat U$ with more than 5k BTC, when the ratio was under 1 U$, and do not regret any trade !  As months goes on, we may be very surprised !

That was my 2 satoshi ;)

There is a small incentive but not on all transactions, a node can decide to broadcast only transactions with small fees and keep transactions with a nice chunky fee to themselves until a block is discovered, this may indirectly introduce the opposite result of a high fee transaction getting confirmed slower because its not getting relayed (that might incentive usage of a fixed fee transactions actually?).