Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP72 amendment proposal

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>]

Indeed -- Every byte added to the QR code makes it more difficult to
be used in restaurants, pubs and other low-light conditions.  BitPay
tested some of these scenarios.

Scannability is absolutely impacted.

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 9:49 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
> A few thoughts on this:
>
> (1) Base64 of SHA256 seems overkill. 256 bits of hash is a lot. The risk
> here is that a MITM intercepts the payment request, which will be typically
> requested just seconds after the QR code is vended. 80 bits of entropy would
> still be a lot and take a long time to brute force, whilst keeping QR codes
> more compact, which impacts scannability.
>
> (2) This should not be necessary in the common HTTPS context. The QR code
> itself is going to be fetched from some service, over HTTPS. I see no
> reasonable attacker that can MITM the request for the BIP70 message but not
> the request to get the QR code. Adding a hash makes QR codes more bloated
> and harder to scan, all on the assumption that HTTPS is broken in some odd
> way that we haven't actually ever seen in practice.
>
> (3) This can be useful in the Bluetooth context, but then again, we could
> also do things a different way by signing with the key in the first part of
> the URI, thus avoiding the need for a hash.
>
> I know I've been around the loop on this one with Andreas many times. But
> this BIP doesn't fix any actually existing problem in the previous spec. It
> exists because Andreas thinks SSL is useless. If SSL is useless we all have
> much bigger problems.
>
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-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/