Draft BIP: Well-Known Bitcoin Identity Endpoint

[Aviv Bar-el]

Hi all,

I'd like to propose a new BIP titled "Well-Known Bitcoin Identity Endpoint."
The goal is to improve the user experience for sending on-chain Bitcoin payments by allowing wallets to resolve a Lightning Address into associated on-chain addresses and additional metadata.

The idea is to define a simple, HTTPS-based standard for retrieving payment and contact information via a .well-known endpoint,
generalizing the approach used by Lightning Address to support more payment types and identity metadata.

You can find the draft BIP here: https://github.com/aviv57/paysats/blob/main/bip/BIPXXX.MD

I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Thanks,
AvivB

[hodlinator]

Hi AvivB,

Something similar has been discussed here in BIP 353: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0353.mediawiki#dns-rather-than-http-based-solutions

Cheers,

Hodlinator

[hodlinator]

(Reading further down in your proposal I see you do acknowledge BIP 353 and the arguments laid out there, sorry for the noise).

[Murch]

Hi Aviv,

Thanks for posting about your BIP idea. I must admit that I have lost
track of the finer details of Lightning Addresses, LNURL, and other
similar schemes, so I’m not in a position to comment on a comparison of
your idea to those.
One of the criticisms that I remember from when Lightning Address was
first introduced was that it would have been better to avoid the email
format. After glancing at your draft, I would like to suggest that you
clarify how you propose that the paysats would be communicated. I would
suggest staying clear of the email format, not only, because senders
sometimes mistake it for an email address, but also because there are
now other similar schemes that use email formatting already and it would
not be clear which resolution to use when encountering it.
Otherwise, this seems like a decent start of a BIP, although it would
help if you lay out more clearly how your idea compares with similar
schemes in the Rationale, in addition to what you already wrote about
BIP 353.

Cheers,

Murch

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to bitcoindev+...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/CAEbZFSsA49mnsVia7L-0k9S%3Doa93nCN4KudHdK8ZnSbboenohw%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/CAEbZFSsA49mnsVia7L-0k9S%3Doa93nCN4KudHdK8ZnSbboenohw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.