Expires after. What is this and what does it mean?

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

I did not notice this Expires after in Receive tab of Electrum. I often open the Address tab to get my receiving addresses.

I am confusing to see it and search for documents but I still can not understand it. With 2 documents, I think Expires after is not important and it means nothing for my receiving address that always exist in my wallet. With one seed, I have one unique wallet and one unique set of receiving address.

I made trials with different time settings and click a few times and I saw different parameters in Request box with time=xxxxxxxxxxxxx&exp=yyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I think it is like scheduled receiving time (similar to locktime when send out my bitcoin).

Could you help me, please.

Set request expires to never or leave it unchanged. This option doesn’t do anything meaningful for on-chain transactions (i.e. not Lightning). People can always send you bitcoin and addresses don’t expire.

https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-use-the-electrum-receive-tab/
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/50779/what-happens-when-request-expires-in-electrum

[Rath_]

I think it is like scheduled receiving time (similar to locktime when send out my bitcoin).

No, it isn't anything like that. Payment requests can help you track and label the coins you are supposed to receive. Nothing happens if someone pays early or late for an invoice. In both cases, you would receive your coins just as if you sent the other person only your receiving address. Lightning payments are an exception. You have to generate a new invoice for every payment because every invoice contains a payment hash which should never be reused.

[o_e_l_e_o]

It's a function that is used if you are requesting payment in bitcoin which is calculated as a fiat price.

For example, you buy something from my webstore which costs $100, but you want to pay in bitcoin. At current prices, that would be somewhere in the region of 0.005658 BTC. I generate a request which I will send you to pay 0.005658 BTC to my address. However, if the price of bitcoin changes markedly, then I want you to change what you would pay, so I still receive the equivalent of $100. So I put an expiry time on the request I generate and send you. If you do not make a payment before the request expires, it flags up in my wallet, so I know that the price may need adjusted.

None of that actually prevents you from making the payment after the request has expired though, and I will always receive any payment you make to my address. It is simply an internal function of Electrum which will display the request as expired. It makes no difference whatsoever at a protocol level.

[BitMaxz]

Additional to the above post the advantage of using request payment is to generate a QR code and URI link and it only generate unused address.
It doesn't matter if it expire or if you receive less or more not the exact requested amount you will still receive it to the requested address.

You can just set it to never if you don't want to expire the requested payment it will stay at the box under "incoming payments'

[Abdussamad]

these other parameters are not a part of the standard:

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