Re: [Bitcoin-development] Instant / contactless payments

[Andreas Schildbach <andreas@schildbach.de>]

> Not sure if you've seen it, but here is how we do NFC right
> now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGOMIG9JUY8 with XBTerminal. 

Thanks for the video! It's always good to see these things in action so
you can start believing in it.

> For now this is just an NDEF URI message with Bitcoin URI inside, and
> then transaction itself propagated to the network by the phone using
> it's own Internet connection. Far not ideal, but even this is supported
> only by Andreas' Wallet, so we cannot move ahead alot really until other
> wallets will have some support in this area.

Supporting Bluetooth is optional in the sense that if a wallet should
not support it, you will still receive the transaction via the P2P
network. So I'd say definately go for Bluetooth.

> As you see - it's taking just few seconds, most of which is manual
> payment confirmation.

I wonder about the receipt step -- are you generating a PDF on device
and sending it via NFC? This is something that could be supported by the
BIP70 payment protocol. We should try to avoid the second tap, its not
intuitive.

> And btw, have you been to London
> lately? Oyster readers now accept contactless cards directly along with
> Oyster cards itself.

Contactless cards? Last I was to London, the Oyster card was already
contactless. Have there ever been magnet-strip-based Oyster cards?

> I wonder if eventually in future we could add
> bitcoin support into that system directly, without hardware replacements.

Neat thought (-: