[Bitcoin-development] Two Proposed BIPs - Bluetooth Communication and bitcoin: URI Scheme Improvements

[Andreas Schildbach]

On 02/06/2015 01:36 AM, Eric Voskuil wrote:

> The main advantage of BLE over BT is that it uses much less power, with
> a trade-off in lower bandwidth (100 kbps vs. 2 mbps). The BLE range can
> be even greater and connection latency lower than BT. For payment
> purposes the lower bandwidth isn't much of a hit.

I'm all for extending the BT:<mac> scheme to Bluetooth LE. If you have
ideas how this can be done please let us know. I haven't had a chance to
play around with LE because none of my devices support it.

I suspect the way how Bluetooth LE transfers files (like payment
requests) is opening a plain old Bluetooth socket. If this is true, I'm
afraid Bluetooth LE would not add anything for sending the BIP70
messages back and forth. Note signed payment requests can easily be 4 kB
in size, so speed *does* matter.