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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
When using bitcoin to pay at the point-of-sale or for a face-to-face transaction, there is the problem of how to communicate the Bitcoin address to be paid in a way that the person paying can use. A bitcoin address is just data, but it is between 27 and 34 characters so that is way to much info to expect the person paying to have to manually type in.A QR code can easily represent this amount of data in a machine-readable manner and do so reliably. The QR code can contain other information as well -- such as an amount and a message and other fields as well -- thanks to a URI scheme for Bitcoin.So with a mobile, a convenient way to pass that data is for the payment recipient (e.g., a merchant) to display a QR code with the Bitcoin address for the transaction, and then for the person paying to scan that QR code to obtain the bitcoin address. A mobile app called Barcode scanner from ZXing is the most widely used app on Android for this. If you are paying using the Blockchain for Android mobile app, then that app will let you touch the QR code button to launch the Barcode scanner app. When the scan is complete, the Bitcoin address field (and amount field if the QR code contained the amount) will then be populated with the data from the QR code. The person paying then hits send and the bitcoin transaction gets created and broadcasted by the mobile app. Web-based wallets (e.g., Instawallet.org) can use a QR code as well, except the user may need manually do a paste of the clipboard contents after scanning.The merchant or trader might use the same mobile app (e.g., Blockchain for Android) which has a built-in method to create and display the QR code for the customer to send payment to which occurs in just one step. Many clients (including Bitcoin-Qt), EWallets and payment processors such as BitPay and WalletBit will show a QR code (or a method to get the QR code displayed) for receiving payment.For those wishing to create a QR code manually can do so using a web-based service such as Wolfram Alpha or several other methods. This does introduce a vulnerability however in that the provider of the QR code could detect that this is a Bitcoin address and maliciously interject another address that the provider controls -- thus directing the consumer to pay the wrong address. So using only a trustworthy source to generate the QR codes is recommended.
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