Paymail Introduction
paymail is a collection of protocols for Bitcoin SV wallets that allow for a set of simplified user experiences to be delivered across all wallets in the ecosystem.
❌ No more complicated 17Dx2iAnGWPJCdqVvRFr45vL9YvT86TDsn addresses
✅ Simple payment handles like <alias>@<domain>.<tld>
The goals of the paymail protocol are:
- User friendly payment destinations through memorable handles
- Permissionless implementation
- Self-hosted or delegated to a managed service
- Automatic service discovery/location
- PKI infrastructure
- Cross-wallet exchange of single-use transaction output scripts of any construction
- Request and response authentication
- Security and policy management
- Capability extensibility and discovery
bsvalias
The family of related protocols are collectively referred to as the bsvalias protocols. At the time of writing, these include:
paymail
paymail is the name for the implementation of the following protocols:
- Service Discovery
- Public Key Infrastructure
- Basic Address Resolution from the Payment Addressing protocol group
The paymail brand is reserved for products and services that, at a minimum, implement each of the above.
Extension Protocols
As defined in the BRFC Specifications, anybody can propose an extension to the bsvalias and paymail protocols, and as per the Capability Discovery section of the Service Discovery protocol, implementations can declare support for extensions to allow for cross-wallet processes.
Extension protocols are the collection of protocols not contained within the core paymail set defined above, but that are fully compatible with bsvalias protocols and paymail implementations. Notable examples presently include: