As a freelancer who's been paid in Bitcoin to write about Bitcoin for over a year, I can say one thing: sometimes, things get awkward on the payment side of things.
Like when I attempt to practice good "Bitcoin hygiene" '" or hell, even just manageable accounting '" by providing my client with a new address for each payout.
Nope. The client frequently defaults to paying the last address he used for me, discarding the new one I've provided. It's perfectly understandable '" who wants to update his payroll database every two weeks? Not me. But the address reuse is bad for both of our privacy, and my accounting begins to get difficult as I struggle to identify which payment is for which piece of work.
Then there are the times when a client textually labels my payment in the memo field, identifying both her publication and myself with the coins. This is of course for her ease of accounting '" which, again, I totally understand '" but then I'm left with the choice of either sending my coins to a mixer (which is risky and expensive), or bearing the vulnerable and exposed feeling of purchasing stuff with coins that essentially have my name and wage stamped on them.
Should I ask my client to stop labeling her payments '" or at least chip in for my mixing costs?
A Solution Arrives
There have been no plug 'n' play solutions to the above conundrums '" until now, with BIP 47 wallet integration on the horizon. BIP 47 provides reusable and human-readable payment codes to make the awkward problems I've been dealing with for the past year disappear.
Privacy
I could put my payment code '" say it's "AmandaBJohnsonBTC" '" on my business cards, and every payment sent to that code will go to a new and separate Bitcoin address that I own (reminiscent of Darkwallet's stealth addresses). No buildup of multiple deposits and withdrawals from the same address. Privacy problem largely solved.
Accounting
But what about my accounting problem? How do I know which client sent which payment? Again, BIP 47 provides the solution '" I will be able to see which other payment code has paid my payment code. For example, I can search my wallet to see the instances of "CoolCryptoMagazinePayroll" making a payment to "AmandaBJohnsonBTC." I can see all the transactions between the two of us displayed in one place, which solves my accounting problem.
Banish My Mixing Fees
Now my privacy and accounting problems are solved '" but what about those pesky payment labels in the "memo" fields? With BIP 47, payment labeling will be redundant. My client can track and verify payroll using her contractors' payment codes, just from within her wallet. No more pesky payment labels means no more mixing fees for me. Problem solved.
As Useful as BIP 32
So here's the burning question: which wallets have integrated BIP 47? As of today, Samourai Wallet has placed themselves on the cutting edge as the only wallet currently compliant. Samourai Wallet is still in its alpha phase, so caution is naturally advised for their early-access users.
Developer of BIP 47, Justus Ranvier, reports that he's spoken with two other wallets about potential integration, and that if payment codes are as useful as he (and I) think they will be, there's good reason to expect that payment codes will see wide wallet integration by mid-2016. Mass uptake has been seen in other wallet-specific BIPs like 32 '" the one for hierarchical deterministic (HD) address generation.
As Jeffrey Tucker has stated, the awkwardness around money and payments is not a human problem '" it's purely technical. I'm very much looking forward to a near future in which an entire branch of technical problems is eliminated from my profession.
via The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network http://ift.tt/1O5MGjA
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