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Are there any Bitcoin clients or services that support sending bitcoins to a HTTP(S) URL instead of having to enter a Bitcoin address directly? (e.g. for donations)


Webmasters could include their Bitcoin address in a link element in each page (same for the whole site or different for each page, e.g. to account which page generated which donation):

<link rel="payment" href="bitcoin:…" title="Donate bitcoins, if my article was of help to you">

The href attribute should contain the Bitcoin address, using the bitcoin URI scheme.

The rel attribute should have the value payment. It’s defined as:

RelPayment is a microformat for making exchanges of support (be it financial or otherwise) possible. By adding rel="payment" to a hyperlink a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink provides a way to show or give support for the current page. For example to give financial support to the owner of the current page.

The (optional) title attribute could contain a small note, e.g. what the donations are used for, or who exactly would be the receiver etc.


Tools (Bitcoin clients/services, browser add-ons etc.) could extract the Bitcoin address by looking for a link with the link type payment whose URI uses the scheme bitcoin. If one enters a webpage URL that hasn’t linked a Bitcoin address, the tool should throw an error. For security reasons probably only link elements should be parsed (instead of a/area), otherwise e.g. commentators could include their own Bitcoin addresses.

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    These things should probably be implemented by browsers, not by clients. May 13, 2013 at 11:10
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    You could create a browser extension yourself that allows you to donate to the current page (when it supports it). May 13, 2013 at 19:23
  • @e-sushi: It’s not a duplicate. A Bitcoin URI scheme is for representing a Bitcoin address as URI, while this question is about using HTTP URIs to send Bitcoin (which could make use of a Bitcoin URI specified on the HTML page).
    – unor
    Oct 30, 2017 at 16:35
  • @unor Woops, my bad… didn’t notice that what you’ve asked about was looking for something going the other way around. Removed my “dupe” comment accordingly.
    – e-sushi
    Oct 30, 2017 at 18:11
  • @asterisk: My reply to e-sushi’s comment above is about the same question: I don’t think it’s a duplicate.
    – unor
    Oct 31, 2017 at 2:34

3 Answers 3

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The client Electrum seems to support something like that (using a different method): Aliases:

Aliases may be server names (e.g. ecdsa.org) or email-like addresses (e.g. [email protected])
The corresponding Bitcoin address is retrieved by the client, using a descriptor located at a canonical url.

Aliases may be entered in the Electrum client, or used in Bitcoin URIs […]

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Yeah I think this feature is going to be awesome; I guess its already included in the HTML5 specs: https://html5.org/r/7850

If this worked similar to "mailto:" across all browsers & OSes, it could become ridiculously easy to accept payments through your website, maybe BitPay wouldn't be needed as long as native clients could pick up the slack & do currency conversion etc. Right now the user needs to exit your page and pull up their wallet to make a payment, which is a huge barrier.

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Armory already supports donating with a syntax like this. The syntax is as follows:

bitcoin:1ArmoryXcfq7TnCSuZa9fQjRYwJ4bkRKfv?amount=1.0&label=Armory%20Developers&message=Donation%20to%20Armory

See https://bitcoinarmory.com/ for the reference of where I got this from, it's at the bottom of the page before the QR code.

That's just an http link where it is using bitcoin: as a prefix similar to how email links are setup, it has the bitcoin amount, the label, and the the address all pretty clearly labeled here.

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    You haven't addressed the question, you've just re-stated bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/bitcoin-url-scheme as already included and linked to in the question.
    – dchapes
    Nov 15, 2013 at 17:22
  • OP is looking for services that support sending bitcoins to a HTTP(S) URL instead of having to enter a Bitcoin address directly, So, your answer is rather useless.
    – e-sushi
    Oct 30, 2017 at 18:13

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