Corralo’s BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Protocol) tackles Bitcoin’s decentralized nature. We all know that Bitcoin doesn’t have a company or centralized entity controlling its operations. Hence, it has always been difficult to suggest or make improvements to its code. Individuals, organizations and groups, interested in improving Bitcoin’s protocol have no cohesive guideline that enables them to forge ahead.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)

The lack of formal structures has given rise to the advent of the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP). These proposals are similar to design documents. They enable developers to introduce information, ideas or features that could help improve Bitcoin. After submission, the community of Bitcoin users, developers, investors, and miners will vote and agree to either implement the proposal or not.

Over time, different developers have submitted their respective proposals to the community. One of the notable proposals was submitted by Matt Corrallo. His proposal, BIP 0021, is a modification of an earlier proposal, by Bitcoin Core developer and the founder of Eligis mining pool Luke Dashjr.

Corralo’s BIP

What Corrallo did was to remove the alternative payment amounts which were present in BIP 0020. Corrallo then suggested that his new mining protocol “BetterHash” should replace “Stratum Protocol” which many clients are currently using.

According to Corrallo’s BIP 0021, there should be a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme which users will use to make Bitcoin payments. According to him, the URI will improve the ease and speed available to users in order to complete transactions. All they have to do is to scan the QR codes or click the links on the web pages.

He went further to specify some rules that should govern the use of the URI for making payments. Every Bitcoin client, without exception, would need to get the authorization of each user before acting on these URIs. The client should mandate the user to approve every payment manually, and must do so for every transaction individually. In some cases, the user can make the decision automatically.

For operating system integration, Corrallo states that graphical Bitcoin clients must be registered handlers by default if there is no other registered handler. However, if a handler is present already, they may encourage the Bitcoin user to change it.

The general format for Corralo’s BIP, is that the path component will consist of a Bitcoin address, while the query component will provide additional payment options. On transfer amount, the proposal states that BTC must be decimal and there will be no use of periods or commas to separate whole numbers, characters or decimal fractions.

Also, clients must always display the Bitcoin amount in a way that the users will understand to avoid deceit. The rationale for Corrallo’s BIP is to ensure that a URI scheme will be a one-time payment and not a platform for exchanging personal information.

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