Microsoft registers bitcoin URI scheme

[kjj]

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.

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.

[1715110759]

1715110759

[1715110759]

1715110759

[1715110759]

1715110759

[Cranky4u]

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

[justusranvier]

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.

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.

[dissipate]

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

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.

[bg002h]

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

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

[dissipate]

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

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.

[Gavin Andresen]

Receiving nodes have no reason to forward transactions on...

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.

[justusranvier]

Receiving nodes have no reason to forward transactions on...

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.

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

[bg002h]

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

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.

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

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

[dissipate]

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

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.

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.

[firefop]

I think that's really cool

[bg002h]

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

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.

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.

yup..you're a good Bitcoin citizen

[blablahblah]

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

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.

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

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.

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.

[Kris]

 

[markm]

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-

[kjj]

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.

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.

[DoomDumas]

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-

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

[poblico]

Receiving nodes have no reason to forward transactions on...

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.

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?).