Bitcoin Microformats: A easier way to send money

[jonwaller]

I was thinking about the advantages of PayPal over Bitcoin, and the way we can make this system much easier for end users.

With PayPal, you can send money to an email address, and email addresses are much easier to remember than Bitcoin addresses.

I was wondering if we could do the same with Bitcoin. Allow people to send money to a domain name.

So instead of sending money to "113oN6A93WnAiK2iKD4BpVMQyDY4fbGEay", why not just send money to "jonwaller.net"?

I think there are nice two ways to do this:
1) Microformats
2) DNS

1) Microformats:
Embed a bitcoin in a web page. Just like RSS or linking an Author, you can add a "LINK" in the head like this:
<link rel="bitcoin" href="http://example.com/page-with-only-my-bitcoin.htm" />

I made a Chrome extension proof of concept:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bkanicejfbhlidgjkpenmddnacjengld

2) DNS
Another way would be through a BITCOIN DNS record, but that's more of a hassle to change, and set up, implementation "left as an exercise for the reader."


Obviously money can go to the wrong person if someone hijacks the website or DNS and replaces their own number, but PayPal is vulnerable to the same thing, and I've never heard of that happening.


What do people think?

[JoelKatz]

Obviously money can go to the wrong person if someone hijacks the website or DNS and replaces their own number, but PayPal is vulnerable to the same thing, and I've never heard of that happening.

PayPal is not vulnerable to the same thing. PayPal just uses an email address as a handle to locate a PayPal account. It doesn't use an untrusted method to map email addresses to accounts.

[jonwaller]

OK, good point. So it's more of a convenience thing, just like http://payb.tc/joelkatz

[NothinG]

I like the idea of this, but maybe could make a few changes?

When people click the BTC icon, it uses

btc://their_address

[ffuentes]

<a rel="bitcoin" href="btc://1gBHSKAJYK34iloKHSAg54gag4GFG" amount="0.5">Click here to pay</a>

[NothinG]

<a rel="bitcoin" href="btc://1gBHSKAJYK34iloKHSAg54gag4GFG" amount="0.5">Click here to pay</a>

I still like the extension to have an icon at the end of the address bar.

[jonwaller]

<a rel="bitcoin" href="btc://1gBHSKAJYK34iloKHSAg54gag4GFG"
amount="0.5">Click here to pay</a>

Regarding the URI, I think we shouldn't use the amount attribute, but
do something like this:
btc://18pnDgDYFMAKsHTA3ZqyAi6t8q9ztaWWXt?label=largellama&amount=21.5&message=Please%20ship%20it%20to%20Mexico.

(This is the format taken from bitcoin-js-remote, I like it and think
it should be standard.)

Will the client pick up btc:// addresses right now?