[Bitcoin-development] Instant / contactless payments

Alex Kotenko alexykot at gmail.com
Thu Mar 6 18:03:20 UTC 2014


2014-03-06 16:46 GMT+00:00 Andreas Schildbach <andreas at schildbach.de>:

> Supporting Bluetooth is optional in the sense that if a wallet should
> not support it, you will still receive the transaction via the P2P
> network. So I'd say definately go for Bluetooth.
>
​Yes, it's part of the​ plan. Just again - I need to make sure we support
all major wallets. And no other wallets actually support NFC by now, not
talking about bluetooth. So I imagine we will decide and implement together
some solution here, both on the wallet and POS sides, but I will have to
keep URI method and even QR codes for backwards compatibility, and wait for
other main wallets to accept innovations before we will be able to
completely switch to it.
As I said earlier - bluetooth support for my POS is not a problem, we can
plug it in easily and make it work. Support among all hardware/software and
polished user experience - this is a main thing here really.

 I wonder about the receipt step -- are you generating a PDF on device

>  and sending it via NFC? This is something that could be supported by the
> BIP70 payment protocol. We should try to avoid the second tap, its not
> intuitive.
>
​No, I'm generating it on server and sending only URL via NFC. I think this
area will change before we launch in production. Ideally I want ​the device
to be completely autonomous, controlled on site by the merchant, probably
with an app on his phone. But right now we have a backend server that gives
merchant a dashboard with device configuration control, transactions
history, daily reconciliation data and copies of receipts. So the PDF is
sent from that server.

​We should avoid second ​tap ideally, but we need to make sure receipts and
payment proofs are usable and understandable for both payers and payees.
Right now a paperless PDF-only process is already a huge leap ahead
comparing to numerous paper receipts printed for each transaction by
existing POS systems.
Implementing proof of payment based on BIP70 payment request+transaction in
the blockchain+memo will require even bigger shift in the merchant's view
on how business runs. Also it will need additional software on his side to
actually be able to view and confirm these proofs of payment. In theory -
yes, BIP70 will create a way to implement proof of payment. In practice in
real life right now I don't see it viable, it will take time to adopt and
few intermediary steps like PDF based paperless process I've implemented.
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