--------------------------------------------------
  BIP: 71
  Title: Payment Protocol MIME types
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2013-07-29
--------------------------------------------------

[[abstract]]
Abstract
~~~~~~~~

This BIP defines a MIME (RFC 2046) Media Type for Bitcoin payment
request messages.

[[motivation]]
Motivation
~~~~~~~~~~

Wallet or server software that sends payment protocol messages over
email or http should follow Internet standards for properly
encapsulating the messages.

[[specification]]
Specification
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Media Type (Content-Type in HTML/email headers) for bitcoin protocol
messages shall be:

[cols=",",]
|==================================================
|Message |Type/Subtype
|PaymentRequest |application/bitcoin-paymentrequest
|Payment |application/bitcoin-payment
|PaymentACK |application/bitcoin-paymentack
|==================================================

Payment protocol messages are encoded in binary.

[[example]]
Example
~~~~~~~

A web server generating a PaymentRequest message to initiate the payment
protocol would precede the binary message data with the following
headers:

------------------------------------------------
Content-Type: application/bitcoin-paymentrequest
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
------------------------------------------------