bitcoin: uri extensions for Payment Protocol

The five-minute read

One action, walked through

1. Open BIP 72 and read the status line before the examples.
2. Write down the rule in one sentence. A fair version of that sentence is: An extension to the bitcoin: URI scheme (BIP 21) to support the payment protocol (BIP 70).
3. Name the object that changes: URI, URL, RFC.
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 72 at the status the text itself states: Deployed.
• The object that has to change is URI, URL, RFC. 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 bitcoin: uri extensions for Payment Protocol accept, and what may it ignore?
• Is this consensus, peer policy, or an application interface?
• Which names does the text pin down: URI, URL, RFC?

Terms

BIP 72

The public text titled bitcoin: uri extensions for Payment Protocol.

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

• An extension to the bitcoin: URI scheme (BIP 21) to support the payment protocol (BIP 70).
• Allow users to click on a link in a web page or email to initiate the payment protocol, while being backwards-compatible with existing bitcoin wallets.
• The bitcoin: URI scheme is extended with an additional, optional "r" parameter, whose value is a URL from which a PaymentRequest message should be fetched (characters not allowed within the scope of a query parameter must be percent-encoded as described in RFC 3986 and bip-0021).

How the mechanism is specified

• Taken from the specification, the next constraint is: Allow users to click on a link in a web page or email to initiate the payment protocol, while being backwards-compatible with existing bitcoin wallets.
• Locate URI, URL, RFC in BIP 72 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 72 when a pitch says 'bitcoin: uri extensions for Payment Protocol' without saying whether the rule is consensus, policy, or an interface. The number is the citation. The pitch is not.