BIP 0071

This page describes a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal). Please see BIP 2 for more information about BIPs and creating them. Please do not just create a wiki page.

  BIP: 71
  Title: Payment Protocol MIME types
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 29-07-2013

Abstract

This BIP defines a MIME (RFC 2046) Media Type for Bitcoin payment request messages.

Motivation

Wallet or server software that sends payment protocol messages over email or http should follow Internet standards for properly encapsulating the messages.

Specification

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
PaymentRequestACK	application/bitcoin-paymentrequestack

Payment protocol messages are encoded in binary.

Example

A web server generating a PaymentRequest message to initiate the payment protocol would precede the binary message data with the following headers:

Content-Type: application/bitcoin-paymentrequest
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Length: number_of_bytes