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return to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals

Note: The following is an excerpt from the official Bitcoin site. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document(s) as the authoritative reference.

This BIP describes an enhancement to the payment protocol ( BIP 70) that addresses the need for short URLs when scanning from QR codes. It generalizes the specification for the behavior of a payment request URL in a way that allows the client and server to negotiate the content of the response using the HTTP Accept: header field. Specifically, the client can indicate to the server whether it prefers to receive a bitcoin URI or a payment request.

Implementation of this BIP does not require full payment request ( BIP 70) support.

The payment protocol augments the bitcoin: uri scheme with an additional “payment” parameter that specifies a URL where a payment request can be downloaded. This creates long URIs that, when rendered as a QR code, have a high information density. Dense QR codes can be difficult to scan resulting in a more frustrating user experience. The goal is to create a standard that would allow QR scanning wallets to use less dense QR codes. It also makes general purpose QR code scanners more usable with bitcoin accepting websites.