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by NavinF 1392 days ago
Ehh I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending from or use the memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned. The latter is how bank wire transfers work, but it’s inefficient for humans so nobody does that.

I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair. This is done once per user. You then verify signatures to “accept” payments.

1 comments

> memo/credit-to field in the transaction as the article mentioned.

I assume there should be an API to prefill this, making it easier for humans. Could literally just be the unique order ID or a hash thereof.

> I guess you could ask users what addresses they are sending

Why would you need to ask? Isn’t there a captive payment portal API, like with popular wallets eg Metamask?

> I’m not sure what you think is inefficient about spending microseconds generating a public/private key pair.

The problem is not in generation. Firstly, it pollutes the blockchain with single use addresses, though I guess maybe people don’t care. But AFAIK, the website would need to pay fees on a per-wallet-transaction basis when cashing out right? Payments need to pay fees anyway, but cashing out from a single wallet would be cheaper than this mess.

> Isn’t there a captive payment portal API

probably? Normally you’d just say “send $5 to xyz” and the user copy-pastes the number and address to their wallet. It’s like sending a wire transfer.

> Firstly, it pollutes the blockchain with single use addresses

UTXO blockchains like Bitcoin were designed with the assumption that each address will only be used for 1 transaction for privacy reasons. There are no per-address fees to cash out. The fees sorta scale with how many UTXOs (incoming transactions) you’re combining to form an outgoing transaction.

Yep, I understood that. My point is cashing out 500 payments from single use wallets leads to 500x the transaction fees versus 1 main wallet, right. The customers would anyway pay the incoming fees, but outgoing gets expensive esp for smaller txes. Why is this optimal for a store?