BIP70 requests can be sent over bluetooth as well, as can transactions. Bitcoin Wallet can already send money even when offline by doing this. It's transparent to the user. I mean original Bluetooth in this context - BLE has incredibly tight data constraints and isn't really meant for data transfer.

Yes Android Beam has a pretty stupid UI. You can actually tap the devices, take them away and then press, but that's not obvious at all. There have been new APIs added in recent releases that give more control over this, so it's possible we can revisit things and make the UI better these days.

The donation to live performer example is good - there's no issue of accidentally paying for someone else in this context as there's only one recipient, but many senders.

The issue of confused payments remains in other situations though.

For the coffee shop use case, it'd be nicer (I think) if we aim for a Square-style UI where the device broadcasts a (link to) a photo of the user combined with a bluetooth MAC. Then the merchant tablet can show faces of people in the shop, and can push a payment request to the users device. That device can then buzz the user, show a confirmation screen, put something on their smart watch etc or just auto-authorise the payment because the BIP70 signature is from a trusted merchant. User never even needs to touch their phone at all.

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Paul Puey <paul@airbitz.co> wrote:

The BIP70 protocol would preclude individuals from utilizing the P2P transfer spec. It would also require that a Sender have internet connectivity to get the payment protocol info. BLE could enable payment w/o internet by first transferring the URI to from Recipient to Sender. Then in the future, we could sign a Tx and send it over BLE back to the recipient (who would still need internet to verify the Tx). This is an important use case for areas with poor 3G/4G connectivity as I've experience myself.

Also, due to Android issues, NFC is incredibly clunky. The URI Sender is required to tap the screen *while* the two phones are in contact. We support NFC the same way Bitcoin Wallet does, but unless the payment recipient has a custom Android device (which a merchant might) then the usage model is worse than scanning a QR code. BLE also allows people to pay at a distance such as for a donation to a live performer. We'll look at adding this to the Motivation section.
Paul Puey CEO / Co-Founder, Airbitz Inc
+1-619-850-8624 | http://airbitz.co | San Diego

DOWNLOAD THE AIRBITZ WALLET:
From: Andreas Schildbach <andreas@sc...> - 2015-02-05 13:47:04
Thanks Paul, for writing up your protocol!

First thoughts:

For a BIP standard, I think we should skip "bitcoin:" URIs entirely and
publish BIP70 payment requests instead. URIs mainly stick around because
of QR codes limited capacity. BIP70 would partly address the "copycat"
problem by signing payment requests.

In your Motivation section, I miss some words about NFC. NFC already
addresses all of the usability issues mentioned and is supported by
mobile wallets since 2011. That doesn't mean your method doesn't make
sense in some situations, but I think it should be explained why to
prefer broadcasting payment requests over picking them up via near field
radio.
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