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Topic: Request: Let's support "bitcoin:" URLs! - page 2. (Read 3938 times)

hero member
Activity: 812
Merit: 1000
one small issue i see is that having the full bitcoin address as clickable, will make it harder to copy+paste if that's what is needed.

better to have the address in plain text, and then a link next to it.
legendary
Activity: 1428
Merit: 1093
Core Armory Developer
Our QR code on every Bit-Pay invoice is the bitcoin: URI, and I can confirm it works with 3 mobile wallets.  Blockchain (iPhone), Bitcoin Wallet (Android) and BitcoinSpinner (Android).  I have paid a Bit-Pay invoice by scanning the QR code and it worked flawlessly.

We did have a clickable link as well, but none of the clients supported it, so we took it off.  Now that Armory does, we will make sure this gets added back to the site with the next update.

Glad to see I have enough street-cred to encourage alone you to re-activate the feature Smiley  

But, I know that Multibit also has support for it, too (with the OS registration).  I thought that Bitcoin-Qt did too, but I haven't seen it work yet...

I didn't realize the QR code used it.  Good to know!  


P.S. -- URL support was added only to the very latest version of Armory: version 0.75.  Previous versions won't work.
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
Our QR code on every Bit-Pay invoice is the bitcoin: URI, and I can confirm it works with 3 mobile wallets.  Blockchain (iPhone), Bitcoin Wallet (Android) and BitcoinSpinner (Android).  I have paid a Bit-Pay invoice by scanning the QR code and it worked flawlessly.

We did have a clickable link as well, but none of the clients supported it, so we took it off.  Now that Armory does, we will make sure this gets added back to the site with the next update.

legendary
Activity: 1204
Merit: 1015
On the plus side, this very forum already supports bitcoin URIs!

See my sig for an example Tongue
legendary
Activity: 1386
Merit: 1004
This would be a great improvement to bitcoin.  It has been talked about before but it seems to be one of the last easy improvements that will have a great impact on usage and adoption. 
legendary
Activity: 1428
Merit: 1093
Core Armory Developer
So I just went to a lot of effort to get Armory to handle "bitcoin:" URLs, and getting it to register itself as the default handler for "bitcoin:" links in both Windows and Linux (or requesting permission from the user to change it if another app is set).  It was a lot of work but totally worth the effort in my opinion.  Because these clickable URL's an awesome improvement to Bitcoin on the internet!

But twice now I've purchased something online, and been met with payment sites that could trivially support them but don't!   CoinDL and Bit-pay.  This is not meant to be a complaint as much as a request:  this is super-easy to support and is awesomely useful!  

Consider CoinDL, which is a service for downloading music for Bitcoins.  The user clicks on the track they want and a payment box pops up.  If they put a bitcoin URL on there, the user simply clicks on it and Bitcoin-Qt/Multibit/Armory pops up with data pre-filled in.   "Address", "Amount" both filled in, and " - : " already included in the transaction label/comments.  Now all they do is confirm and click send!  (and probably type in an encryption passphrase).  No copy&paste necessary, at all.  Period.

Not only is it a super-smooth experience for the user, but the user ends up with a well-documented transaction history of their music purchases along with dates and prices.  The merchant is better equipped to give a meaningful tx-comment anyway:  they can trivially put the Order# and purchase information into the message field of the URL so the user ends up with all of it documented for zero effort.  Worst case the user doesn't like it and change it before they hit send...

Here is the Bitcoin URI Spec and below is a simple example of how you would include it (using my donation address, of course!)

Code:

...which looks like:  Donate 1.0 BTC to the Armory Project!

Messages and labels in the URL can be universally encoded using the percent encoding scheme.  It consists of taking the message you want to put into the URL, and replacing all spaces with "%20", all exclamation points with %21, etc.  It's all on that link.

Just do it!


EDIT: I posted a walk-thru of the technical details for supporting URLs, which addresses both merchants and registering your application with the OS.  I posted what I've learned over the past two weeks, and wouldn't mind some feedback if folks have experience with the OS-registration stuff (specifically, Unity or KDE-based Linux systems, and Mac/OSX in general)
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