Payment Protocol MIME types

The five-minute read

One action, walked through

1. Open BIP 71 and read the status line before the examples.
2. Write down the rule in one sentence. A fair version of that sentence is: A MIME (RFC 2046) Media Type for Bitcoin payment request messages.
3. Name the object that changes: MIME, RFC, HTML.
4. Ask what an old client, an old contract, or an offline counterparty does. If the document is silent, the silence is part of the design.

The argument, unpacked

What has to be true

• You are implementing BIP 71 at the status the text itself states: Deployed.
• The object that has to change is MIME, RFC, HTML. A neighbouring document with a similar name is not this one.
• Status in the header is not adoption.

What happened after the paper

The source marks this deployed. That is a statement about the text, not a promise that every wallet or node has shipped it. Later documents can narrow, replace, or ignore this one. Cite the number you mean.

What to check before you use the idea

• What must an implementation of Payment Protocol MIME types accept, and what may it ignore?
• Is this consensus, peer policy, or an application interface?
• Which names does the text pin down: MIME, RFC, HTML?

Terms

BIP 71

The public text titled Payment Protocol MIME types.

Deployed

The document's own label for how finished the text is. It is not a market fact.

The problem the paper names

An interface that is only a name in a repository will be re-implemented differently by every team, which is how shared contracts break.

What the design proposes

• A MIME (RFC 2046) Media Type for Bitcoin payment request messages.
• Wallet or server software that sends payment protocol messages over email or http should follow Internet standards for properly encapsulating the messages.
• The Media Type (Content-Type in HTML/email headers) for bitcoin protocol messages shall be: {| | Message || Type/Subtype |- | PaymentRequest || application/bitcoin-paymentrequest |- | Payment || application/bitcoin-payment |- | PaymentACK || application/bitcoin-paymentack |} Payment protocol messages are encoded in binary.

How the mechanism is specified

• Taken from the specification, the next constraint is: Wallet or server software that sends payment protocol messages over email or http should follow Internet standards for properly encapsulating the messages.
• Locate MIME, RFC, HTML in BIP 71 and apply it to one transaction or call.
• Then check the failure the class of rule always has: a node that did not upgrade, a reverted call, a replayed signature, or a peer that does not speak the message.

What this page does not treat as proven

• This document does not set a fee, a valuation, or a security proof.
• Status in the header is not adoption.
• The source marks this deployed. That is a statement about the text, not a promise that every wallet or node has shipped it.

Why a venture studio still reads it

Use BIP 71 when a pitch says 'Payment Protocol MIME types' without saying whether the rule is consensus, policy, or an interface. The number is the citation. The pitch is not.