can we send bitcoin to ip addresses?

[Accardo]

Moreover, the Ip address reveals their location.

Only if they don't use VPN or other method to hide "real" IP address.

That would have been a set back and will expose bitcoin transaction to different kinds of third parties like you mentioned, VPN, can lead to a man in the middle attack. Satoshi chose using URL in place of IP, but the digital signature will depend on certificate authorities to make confirmation that a bitcoin transaction was sent to the real owner of the site. Hence, that would still be ambiguous to non technical users who are into bitcoin. The whole concept would have derailed the primary aim of full decentralization. I don't think they will be need for a PGP digital signature security if sending bitcoin to IP was not removed.

[ranochigo]

That would have been a set back and will expose bitcoin transaction to different kinds of third parties like you mentioned, VPN, can lead to a man in the middle attack. Satoshi chose using URL in place of IP, but the digital signature will depend on certificate authorities to make confirmation that a bitcoin transaction was sent to the real owner of the site. Hence, that would still be ambiguous to non technical users who are into bitcoin. The whole concept would have derailed the primary aim of full decentralization.

Satoshi adopted IP instead of URL, DNS poisoning would be a more likely attack vector rather than IP addresses. TCP packets are difficult to falsify as compared to broadcasting from a rogue BGP. Using IP as a primary identifier would also be problematic given how dynamic IPs work.

I don't think they will be need for a PGP digital signature security if sending bitcoin to IP was not removed.

PGP is completely independent of Bitcoin. It is a way to verify the authenticity of the message with regards to a known sender.

[Davidvictorson]

It's removed because it is very inaccurate and insecure. Bitcoin communications are never encrypted and thus your ISP or anyone on your network could respond with their own address. Besides, there is no tangible benefits to doing so. The message part is local, just a memo for you to indicate what the transaction is for.

@ranochigo Yes, I noticed this being able to send bitcoin to IP Address in the early days of bitcoin. And you are correct, the inaccuracy and insecurity of this methods made it to be removed. Bitcoin development if I may say so, is constantly changing and the developers are looking for more secure and accurate ways to send and receive bitcoins. Do you think we have reached the final stage of methods for sending bitcoins, or are we going to see the current ways of sending and receiving bitcoin being replaced by innovative and even more secure methods?

[Kakmakr]

Why do you willingly want to dox yourself, by bitcoins being send to an IP Address that are linked to you? The whole idea behind pseudo anonymity is for you not to reveal your personal information.

You also open yourself up to a "Man-in-the-middle" attack, where a hacker can intercept the transaction with a spoofed or duplicate address and then you lose those coins. 

[ranochigo]

Bitcoin development if I may say so, is constantly changing and the developers are looking for more secure and accurate ways to send and receive bitcoins. Do you think we have reached the final stage of methods for sending bitcoins, or are we going to see the current ways of sending and receiving bitcoin being replaced by innovative and even more secure methods?

Don't see how you need to have another format to represent addresses. Bitcoin address and individual identities should have 1-to-1 relationship, where it is fulfilled by our public key schemes and it is highly unlikely that an address would be unintentionally be associated with a different identity than the original owner. Certain addresses like P2WSH are longer, and are encoded in a slightly different manner but the gist of it is still the same.

[DaveF]

Just imagine the difficulty if every time you wanted to send someone BTC you would have to verify that their IP did not change and that their node was online. For a bunch of tech people playing around with BTC when it was new that's fine. As adoption grew, there really was no reason to keep that feature since most people would be sending to addresses anyway.

Would it be nice to still have? Possibly, but not really worth putting in the time and effort to develop it more.
And as IPv6 replaces IPv4 the addresses become so much longer.

192.168.1.100 is somewhat easy

2001:db8:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888 is a lot longer to deal with.

-Dave

[Accardo]

PGP is completely independent of Bitcoin. It is a way to verify the authenticity of the message with regards to a known sender.

@ranochigo Talking about PGP, during the usage of IP or if domain names were later used by merchants wouldn't PKI be the digital certificate needed to verify the authenticity of a message or transaction. Would they be need for asymmetric cryptography when securing a digital signature from getting impersonated or cracked. Please I'll appreciate a clarification on this.

Excuse me, did you reply to my post with AI generated text? This discussion is about IP transaction[1] and Bitcoin Core (previously called "Bitcoin-Qt" and "Bitcoin") never support send Bitcoin to HTTP/HTTPS URL.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/IP_transaction

It was once proposed and discussed by some forum members including Satoshi on this thread, that URL can be used to reduce the threat using mere IP could bring, but like Ranochigo already said about DNS Poisoning, that would have been a problem if Url was chosen, such things as DDOS attack or phishing will be a norm.  That was a mistake, where I used "chose", he only discussed the idea; its advantage and disadvantages. However, do you consider a mistake or what you don't understand clearly as AI generated content? No AI is as intelligent to write like I did, if my text looks like one then my writing improved suddenly.

[NotATether]

PGP is completely independent of Bitcoin. It is a way to verify the authenticity of the message with regards to a known sender.

@ranochigo Talking about PGP, during the usage of IP or if domain names were later used by merchants wouldn't PKI be the digital certificate needed to verify the authenticity of a message or transaction. Would they be need for asymmetric cryptography when securing a digital signature from getting impersonated or cracked. Please I'll appreciate a clarification on this.

HTTPS certificates are not using keys made by PGP, they use a standard RSA certificate in the PEM file format for certificates (created by OpenSSL), which look something like this:

Code:

====== BEGIN CERTIFICATE ======
<Lots of base64 text>
====== END CERTIFICATE ======

This might be confused with PGP public and private keys, because they have almost this exact same format. (Certificate is just replaced with Public Key or Private Key). And this format is even used for Bitcoin signed messages.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Do you think we have reached the final stage of methods for sending bitcoins, or are we going to see the current ways of sending and receiving bitcoin being replaced by innovative and even more secure methods?

What can be better than a Bitcoin address? It doesn't require a machine running 24/7, doesn't have liquidity or connectivity requirements, is extremely difficult to error due to checksum, and it's a short text anyone can even write down if needed. It's perfect.

Just imagine the difficulty if every time you wanted to send someone BTC you would have to verify that their IP did not change and that their node was online.

That is trivial to correct with running a hidden service. You'd have to, not only for that, but because it's hard for many to port forward.

[ranochigo]

@ranochigo Talking about PGP, during the usage of IP or if domain names were later used by merchants wouldn't PKI be the digital certificate needed to verify the authenticity of a message or transaction. Would they be need for asymmetric cryptography when securing a digital signature from getting impersonated or cracked. Please I'll appreciate a clarification on this.

Not really sure what you're talking about this.

Generally, you'll have to have a form of web-of-trust that allows you to validate the identity of the person that you're talking to. You can encrypt your connections by using Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange but the person that you're talking to has to establish that they're the correct party, which provides no protection against MITM attacks. Hence, it is generally recommended for people to meet up physically to verify each other's certificates, instead of relying on the keys given through the internet.

[Flexystar]

I didn't know it was possible to send Bitcoin using an IP address. Glad to know that it was stopped.
I believe this is an insecure method to send Bitcoin as there might be several wallets in the same IP.
Moreover, the Ip address reveals their location.

I was also surprised to see this thread and the discussion is just amazing. We had so many way outs back then and IP address was considered one of them. I don't know may be back then the IP address or as such internet was not everyone's cup of tea and thus it was limited by its interaction. If Satoshi is alive today then he might have already laughed at his own idea of sending the Bitcoin's to IP address. The world has changed a lot and internet has become complex network with more chances of cyber attacks if your IP is breached.

Bitcoin would have not survived. It would have been hacked now and then by smartest high school kid too! That much weak this system would have been. I think it's worth that developers had debate on this back in the time and they changed this protocol. Nice walk through the history of mechanisms.