Re: [Bitcoin-development] Extending the Payment Protocol with vCards

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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Hey Taylor,

It's great to see people thinking about payment protocol extensions. I'm
not totally convinced vCard support is the best idea relative to social
network integration - I can't recall the last time I saw someone use a
vCard. However, that should not hold you back from experimenting or
prototyping. All an extension requires is some tag numbers and we're not in
danger of running out of numbers any time soon.

The reason I favour social network integration is because those are the
ID's people already have. Distributed social networks (like the PGP web of
trust) have never really taken off, and fixing that is an entirely separate
project to Bitcoin.

Doing so is quite easy. Major social networks all have a concept of a user
ID, moreover, one that can be queried without any kind of API authorization
for basic info. Examples:

https://graph.facebook.com/i.am.the.real.mike
https://plus.google.com/s2/u/0/photos/profile/114798402540078632611

So you could simply embed a social network URL into a payment request, and
use that to associate a name/photo with a payment. That would be
unauthenticated (the sender is not proving they are the real owner of the
social network profile). However, authentication may not turn out to be
necessary. If it were to be, then steganographically embedding a key into
the profile picture and signing the payment request with it would be a way
to do so.


On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 6:43 PM, Taylor Gerring <taylor.gerring@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I made a post on the BitcoinTalk forums <
> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=329229.0> outlining how the
> Payment Protocol could be extended with optional vCard support to increase
> the usability of Payment Protocol for user-to-user transactions and improve
> the user experience in wallets supporting PP.
>
> I’ve outlined the concept in as much detail as my feeble brain can handle,
> drawing on BIP 0070 itself and Mike Hearn’s Payment Protocol FAQ. I know
> there is interest in “contact exchange” functionality from the Hive team,
> so I’m hoping this will begin a discussion on how we can make wallets more
> friendly in a standard way.
>
> Please read, digest, and let me know if you have any feedback.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Taylor Gerring
>
>
>
>
>
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