<pre>
  BIP: 71
  Layer: Applications
  Title: Payment Protocol MIME types
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
  Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0071
  Status: Final
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2013-07-29
</pre>

==Abstract==

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

==Motivation==

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

==Specification==

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

{|
| Message || Type/Subtype
|-
| PaymentRequest || application/bitcoin-paymentrequest
|-
| Payment || application/bitcoin-payment
|-
| PaymentACK || application/bitcoin-paymentack
|}

Payment protocol messages are encoded in binary.

==Example==

A web server generating a PaymentRequest message to initiate the
payment protocol would precede the binary message data with the
following headers:
<pre>
Content-Type: application/bitcoin-paymentrequest
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
</pre>