Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Myth: the Payment Protocol is bad for privacy
by
benjyz
on 02/06/2014, 11:35:11 UTC
At the other hand, from the paying side, when I get to a merchant's web page that gives me SSL authenticated bitcoin deposit address and the amount I ought to send - why in a world would it not be enough for me?
Why would I need an additional, payment request, signed with exactly the same certificate?

Good luck taking your screenshot of the "SSL authenticated bitcoin deposit address and the amount" to court when the merchant claims you didn't pay.

In other words, you don't really understand which problems the payment protocol is trying to solve.

Which court? If the merchant is in Chile and the customer in Russia, what use is this? Bitcoin is a global system, but there is no world court people can go to, to settle disputes. This can in theory only apply if the two parties agree which court settles disputes, and the court even considers itself responsible. If you're drafting social protocols you should have some understanding of how economic transactions work. Commercial transactions consist of much more than just the payment itself (what happens if there is no delivery, delivery not on time, bad deliveries, ...). And if you want to integrate with legal systems via software, you better clearly specify what you're talking about. Since when is the Bitcoin network dependent on courts?! And if the payment protocol addresses any of these issues, why is it not stated in the draft protocol. That's what these kinds of documents are there for. You would find that it would be much like writing law, because you would have to first define merchants, customers, payments. And then Bitcoin is not about "payments" between merchants and customers. It's about transactions between peers. So the nature of the system and the debate already has shifted dramatically.