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April 02, 2014, 07:15:37 AM |
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Protocol overview
In a normal Bitcoin payment, the process starts with the user either clicking a bitcoin URI or copy and pasting a textual address into their wallet app and manually specifying the amount.
In a payment handled by the payment protocol, the process is initiated in one of two ways:
The user clicks a Bitcoin URI that has a new "r" parameter, which contains a (http) URL that resolves to a payment request file.
The user opens a payment request file directly.
The user's wallet then parses the payment request data, which is a protocol buffer, and starts the process of requesting confirmation as normal. When clicking a Bitcoin URI, the instructions in the rest of the URI are ignored (they are for backwards compatibility only) and the data found at the given URL takes precedence.
The payment request is made up of an outer "skin" message that contains (optional) signature and certificate data, and an embedded serialization of the inner "core" message that contains the details of the requested payment. The outer PaymentRequest message is agnostic as to the kind of digital signature infrastructure used, but currently only an X.509 binding is defined. This is the same system as used in SSL. The inner PaymentDetails message is stored in binary form rather than being embedded like a normal protobuf message would be to ensure that signature bytes always match.
Once a satisfying set of Bitcoin transactions are created by the wallet, a Payment message is formatted and uploaded to the destination URL specified by PaymentDetails, and then a PaymentACK message is received by the wallet once the payment is accepted satisfactorily.
TLDR; Its like http:// for bitcoin, encodes payment info inside a URL link
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