Re: [Bitcoin-development] Error handling in payment protocol (BIP-0070 and BIP-0072)

[Ross Nicoll <jrn@jrn.me.uk>]

Dear Gavin, Andreas,

I'd see standardisation (or at least suggested standards) for error
handling as positive for consistency of user experience. I do see what
you mean about over-specification, however.

Thanks for the feedback, I've taken the main points and created two pull
requests:

BIP-0070: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/54/
BIP-0072: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/55/

Please tell me if these need any further work.

Ross

On 26/04/14 14:23, Gavin Andresen wrote:
>> The main area of concern is handling unexpected problems while sending
>> the Payment message, or receiving the corresponding PaymentACK message.
>> For example, in case of a transport layer failure or non-200 HTTP status
>> code while sending the Payment message, what should the wallet software
>> do next? Is it safe to re-send the Payment message? I'd propose that for
>> any transport failure or 500 status code, the client retries after a
>> delay (suggested at 30-60 seconds). For 400 status codes, the request
>> should not be repeated, and as such the user should be alerted and a
>> copy of the Payment message saved to be resent later.
>>
> Why does error handling have to be standardized?
>
> I generally think that wallet software should be free to do whatever gives
> the user the best experience, so I'm in favor of restricting BIPs to things
> that must be standardized so that different implementations inter-operate.
>
>
>> For 300 (redirect and similar) status codes, is it considered safe to
>> follow redirects? I think we have to, but good to make it clear in the
>> specification.
>>
> Referencing whatever RFCs defines how to fetch URLs would be the best way
> to do this. Submit a pull request.
>
>
>> On the merchant's side; I think it would be useful for there to be
>> guidance for handling of errors processing Payment messages. I'd suggest
>> that Payment messages should have a fixed maximum size to avoid merchant
>> systems theoretically having to accept files of any size; 10MB would
>> seem far larger than in any way practical, and therefore a good maximum
>> size?
>
> PaymentRequests are limited to 50,000 bytes. I can't think of a reason why
> Payment messages would need to be any bigger than that. Submit a pull
> request to the existing BIP.
>
>
>> A defined maximum time to wait (to avoid DDoS via connection
>> holding) might be useful too, although I'd need to do measurements to
>> find what values are tolerable.
>>
> Implementation detail that doesn't belong in the spec, in my humble opinion.
>
>
>> I would like to have the protocol state that merchant systems should
>> handle repeatedly receiving the same Payment message, and return an
>> equivalent (if not identical) PaymentACK to each. This is important in
>> case of a network failure while the client is sending the Payment
>> message, as outlined above.
>>
> I think this should be left to implementations to work out.
>
>
>> Lastly, I'm wondering about potential timing issues with transactions;
>> if a merchant system wants to see confirmation of a transaction before
>> sending a PaymentACK...
>
> .... not a good idea. The user should get feedback right away. Poking a
> "pay now" button and then waiting more than a second or three to get "your
> payment has been received and is being processed" is terrible UI.
>
>