On Wednesday, the Bitcoin community went into a tizzy over BIP 75 (BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal ), which is, in short, a layer-2 protocol for improving the user friendliness of Bitcoin payments.
The community, especially on Reddit, is concerned that the option to identify oneself to the sender or receiver of a payment may lead down the road toward know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) restrictions on the Bitcoin protocol. The hysteria around this proposal appears to have emerged from a post made by Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd to the Bitcoin development mailing list .
What is BIP 75?
Before getting into the controversy, it’s important to understand the details of BIP 75. Bitcoin Magazine reported on the proposal’s ability to simplify wallets for the average Joe earlier this year, but here are the key points: BIP 75 attempts to solve some of the privacy and security concerns with the Payment Protocol, which was outlined by former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Gavin Andresen and former Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn in BIP 70 .
Human-readable names can be used to make the payment process more user-friendly and create a Venmo -esque experience in Bitcoin wallets.
The co-authors of BIP 75 are from Netki ( Justin Newton and Matt David ) and Breadwallet ( Aaron Voisine and James MacWhyte ).
What Are the Concerns with BIP 75?
There are currently two separate concerns with BIP 75 being discussed in the Bitcoin community. For one, some people believe that this BIP could make it easier to trace Bitcoin payments to real-world identities or simply streamline KYC and AML compliance for Bitcoin. The other issue is whether this BIP should be included in the main BIPs section of the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository .“I’d strongly argue that we remove […]
