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by mike-cardwell 1976 days ago
I understand that the person paying probably needs an account somewhere, so that payments can be batched together to reduce transaction fees.

However, there's no reason for me to have an account anywhere in order to receive bitcoin. All I need is a bitcoin address.

I don't want to sign up with Coil, Interledger, Uphold, Gatehub, or any other random third party, in order to receive bitcoin. And there is zero reason why I would have to.

1 comments

Except that Interledger is not a "random third party", it's a protocol: https://interledger.org/

So that you can make payments to someone else regardless of whether they want to use Bitcoin or not.

I believe Interledger is the right level of abstraction for this, in the same way that you wouldn't want your email server to have to know or code against the lower protocols, e.g. Ethernet or WiFi, but only IP, TCP and SMTP. This way your email server can EHLO any email server, regardless of the network topology or underlying protocols.

Interledger does the same for payments.

Ok, so my bitcoin address is "bitcoin:1PQLtWnjUi1itHLG6QCQeHM3Nxua8pRsq1". What tag do I put in my HTML in order to receive payment from this system, without having to sign up anywhere?
You can just put that there - and then you hope that user agents implement this - or you can use interledger.
The documentation for Interledger appears to be for people who want to build software, not for people who want to send or receive money. And it talks about setting up accounts with xpring.io or rafiki.money.

I see no evidence that Interledger can be used for receiving money without having to set up accounts or run software. Plenty of evidence to the contrary.

As I said before, to receive bitcoin from one of these systems, there is nothing I should need to do other than advertise my bitcoin address. Anything more than that, and the system sucks.

> the system sucks

Correct.

What you want requires support in the user agent (web browser) though.