Payment Protocol MIME types

  BIP: 71
  Layer: Applications
  Title: Payment Protocol MIME types
  Authors: Gavin Andresen 
  Status: Deployed
  Type: Specification
  Assigned: 2013-07-29

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:

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