4.2 KiB
Bitcoin Cash Metadata Registry caching server
Adding metadata to boring payments is a very powerful idea to increase the value of the basic financial system we are building in Bitcoin Cash.
A simple payment made in a store that gets the logo of the store added in your wallet, a store owner that is able to share their website or contact information directly to customers and for access in their wallets!
Buying and selling of NFTs are generally massively more powerful with some added metadata. From that concert ticket showing which concert it is about and which company sold it, to collectibles and more.
Even simply having the ability of a trusted person vetting tokens and images is metadata that is useful. Your wallet can avoid showing you "collectibles" that are nothing more than advertisements or scams if that metadata is available.
A caching metadata server
For the wallet or website there is a real challenge getting hold of the metadata because it is by its nature decentralized and people can create new identities and tokens without coordination or permission. While great for innovation, there are various cases where finding the metadata is too hard.
Many payments are made between two parties using some sort of payment protocol which should be able to transfer metadata, but today this is not common. The receiver is often left to figure out on their own what token they received.
Additionally, the metadata description may include links to images or icons, some of them on slow or unreliable servers (or even ipfs).
The solution is to have a central webserver to collect and distribute those materials which makes it easier for wallets and websites to find the data they need.
Permissioned
The idea of anyone being able to create a token or identity is very powerful and allows for great innovation and freedom.
The downside is that there is no way for an innocent bystander to know if any specific data is actually trustworthy.
In the digital space it is trivial to copy an existing identity. An official token for some big company would have the logo of that company and similar details. And this is how people judge that something is real. But a scammer can copy those details and ship their own token or identity in a way that there is no way for normal people to tell which is the real one.
Apart from stealing ones identity, the powerful idea of getting an identity's image shown in any wallet that received tiny money is certainly going to lead to a resurgence of spamming. Imagine a "company" that has a logo which is basically an advertisement for their product. And then they send everyone a fraction of a cent worth of coin to show it in their wallet. Spam in your wallet, how nice!
What this project introduces is several trust levels (details) that allows a wallet to give much more informed choices to the user. When the trust is specifically stated to be bad, the wallet will be able to just ignore the spam they received.
How would a wallet or website use this?
My own webserver is running on bcmr.flowee.cash and there you can find the various metadata. There are basically two primitives in the bitcoin cash world you should understand.
- Auth-chain
This is an identity that publishes metadata files. The ownership of this identity is based on simple bitcoin cash transactions. An update of the metadata can be done by moving some money on the chain. - Token Category
A cashtoken will always have a category, as such a wallet that receives a token will know the category.
In simple cases both are the same ID, but when an owner has multiple tokens this obviously stops being the case. And similarly, an auth-chain owner can simply use the metadata in payment requests without without any tokens and the wallet will show company names and logos.
For example when a user pays in a store, they may receive an auth-chain ID. Which is just like a transaction-id, a 64 character hexadecimal.
There is a single json you can download with the ID.json as a name. With details like the name, a description and image urls. As this is a caching server you can find the images on the server too.
This json includes a trust field, as set by the server operator. Imposers or spam will not stand a chance if the wallet uses that.