Early in 2018, BitPay announced that they would be adopting the BIP70 system which means merchants that wish to use the BitPay service need to have BIP70 ready Bitcoin wallets.What is BIP70?According to CCN:
“BIP70 seeks to accomplish this by allowing customers to make payments to human-readable payment addresses(e.g. “example.com), rather than standard bitcoin addresses, which are long and easy to misread. The payment standard also includes support for transaction received messages, as well as the automatic generation of refund addresses.”Btc.com is the home to around 1 million Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash wallets. With this latest news, it now seems that BIP70 will become the main protocol for all of their wallets, facilitated by BitPay. The VP of Business Operations at Btc.com, Alejandro de la Torre believes that this will be beneficial to BTC.com, because BitPay in turn are one of the largest Bitcoin payment providers in the world. De la Torre has said:
“When a merchant uses BitPay, in order for their customers to pay using bitcoin or bitcoin cash, they must use a BIP 70 compatible wallet to complete the transaction. BitPay is one of the biggest providers of crypto-merchant services, and we believe in offering the best payment experience for our users that also supports onboarding merchants.”BIP70 is seen as a controversial alternative to the more industry standard BIP21. The reason for this is that many believe BIP70 could lead to an increased risk of AML/KYC surveillance and could also lead to other bugs and security vulnerabilities within Bitcoin payments. De la Torre however believes Btc.com, through their research can conclude that the BIP70 system is far more secure than many believe and that overall, Btc.com see no further threat and can conclude that all users of Btc.com will be safe, once the adoption of BIP70 is completed.According to CCN, De le Torre has added:
“We have taken the time to carefully evaluate all security and privacy concerns, and we are certain that our users are completely safe with the BTC.com wallet.”Why make the change?Btc.com know that cryptocurrencies are going to be a huge part of the future, therefore they want to make sure that the experience of their platform is as easy to use as possible. SImply put, Btc.com believe BIP70 will make Btc.com safer, more secure and far easier to use.To conclude in the words of De la Torre:
“Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash have many financial benefits compared to credit cards such as lower transaction fees and irreversible payments. However, we as an industry still need to see more development in terms of user experience, making it easier for newcomers to feel safe and work intuitively.”References CCN Investment Disclaimer