Bitcoin Forum

Is it possible to add magnet link support similar to those used by bittorrent sites to the Bitcoin program so you could make a magnet link of your Wallet address? That way people with Bitcoin installed could just click a link and have an easy way to donate or pay for stuff.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/URI_Scheme

Someone needs to write a Firefox/Chrome/IE extension to support that scheme.

Let's do it?!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0021

what would an extension do? if the client program doesn't register the URI scheme you can't really do anything and most people would do anyway

Based on this reply i think it can be done in a hackish nature for Chrome:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2337525/1219907

if you read the top, it says that it needs to be registered to the OS, bitcoin-qt isn't registered to the OS as a handler for the bitcoin URI.

These URIs should all work "out-of-the-box" if your Bitcoin application does its job correctly (and registers itself with your OS).  Unfortunately, Bitcoin-Qt does not do this, for reasons I haven't fully understood yet (perhaps bugginess of implementation).  However, most of the alternative clients do this, and simply installing and/or running those programs once will then make "bitcoin:" links clickable from any browser without the user having to setup anything.

Armory checks for the currently-registered application on load and asks if you want to make Armory default.  Multibit and Electrum, I believe they register themselves as the "bitcoin:" handler when you install them.  I think some pressure should be applied to the core Bitcoin-Qt dev team to do something like this too.  It's a tremendously valuable feature for Bitcoin users, especially new ones, to not have to copy and paste information all over the place to send money.  

I see, yup just read up on it and it can be achieved i believe from bitcoin-qt by coding up the following:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767914%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Read etotheipi what says about bitcoin-qt, it doesn't support the bitcoin URI as of now, and plus if you could send the URI to bitcoin-qt it will not parse it or accept it. So getting bitcoin-qt to work would take you coding it yourself.

I thought the installer for bitcoin-qt took care of the URI registration, but the standalone won't do it. It's an NSIS installer, so it would be easy to extract the code and create a patcher that updates the registry without doing anything else.

only bad thing that is only for windows not Mac :(

I tried it just for fun, but for some reason the string doesn't get passed properly, or else Bitcoin-qt doesn't yet know how to handle URIs. This is the code I used:


It works, except that when you click a link bitcoin-qt complains that it is already running and then exits.

Bitcoin-Qt does fully support bitcoin URIs, and has since version 0.6.0, it just doesn't doesn't automatically register itself as a URI handler. You can register it manually if you want, and even if you don't, you can still pass bitcoin URIs to it as a command-line argument or drag-and-drop bitcoin URI links onto the Bitcoin-Qt window.

What version of Bitcoin-Qt are you using?

0.6.3

Not directed towards any particular person/group, I created a walk-thru based on my experience implementing URI support in Armory.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79010.0

It shows how to do it in windows with the registry (non-admin, like Firefox/Chrome/IE setting your default browser), and for a couple of Ubuntu/Gnome variants (because it's fairly straightforward in Gnome, but Ubuntu 11.04+ switched to Unity and this kind of registration doesn't work anymore).

What happens if you just run "bitcoin-qt bitcoin:somerandomaddress" from the command line (while Bitcoin-Qt is already running)?

I get the same error:
https://i.imgur.com/A9AFv.png

Huh. What happens if you drag-and-drop a bitcoin URI link onto the Bitcoin-Qt window?

That works, but it is a bit of a PITA. Also, you have to drop it in the big blank area, it won't work if you drop it anywhere else such as in the address field.

Aha! So I'm not just hallucinating the whole bitcoin URI support thing. Why doesn't it work the proper way, I wonder?

that doesn't work on mac js