Bitcooin BIP 75 Proposal Raises Debate: Security/Privacy vs Easy-To-Use Wallets

The BIP 75 proposal to improve bitcoin’s ease of use has drawn a lot of criticism among bitcoiners on account of the option for a receiver to identify himself to the sender, according to an article by Bitcoin Magazine’s Kyle Torpey disseminated by Nasdaq.
Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd ignited the recent debate with a post to the bitcoin development mailing list recommending boycotting BIP 75 on account of anti-money laundering/know your customer (AML/KYC) concerns. Todd urged removing BIP 75 from the BIP repository and boycotting wallets that use it.
‘It’s bad strategy for bitcoin developers to willingly participate in AML/KYC, just the same way as it’s bad for Tor to add wiretapping functionality, and W3C to support DRM tech,’ Todd wrote on Reddit.
Others argued BIP 75 provides a way to encrypt the payment protocol and make it bi-directional. This is enabled through some of the new payment protocol message types such as InvoiceRequest, ProtocolMessage and EncryptedProtocolMessage.
BIP 75 Addresses BIP 70 Concerns
BIP 75 addresses some of the privacy and security concerns with the payment protocol that former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer, Gavin Andresen and former Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn outlined in BIP 70.
BIP 75, unlike BIP 70, has end-to-end encryption. The co-authors of BIP 75 are Matt David and Justin Newton of Netki and James MacWhyte and Aaron Voisine of Breadwallet.

This post was published at Crypto Coins News on 03/07/2016.

Comments are closed.