BIPs bitcoin improvement proposals

Payment Protocol MIME types

  BIP: 71 source
  Layer: Applications
  Title: Payment Protocol MIME types
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
  Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0071
  Status: Final
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2013-07-29

Table of Contents

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
PaymentACK application/bitcoin-paymentack

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