New Bitcoin Core Upgrade To Disable BIP70 Proposal By Default; Huge Blow To Services Like BitPay

The Bitcoin community is in upheaval as it was recently revealed that the Bitcoin Core developers plan to ditch the BIP70 proposal with the next upgrade.

The idea is not completely new, but it has been getting more traction lately. Now, the developers intend to disable BIP70 by default with the 0.19.0 upgrade. There is even a possibility to remove it completely later.

BitPay Will Be Affected

BIP70 is the old payment address format. Most wallets prefer the BIP21 version, meaning that BitPay has stuck with the old and less popular version. This has caused some issues for BitPay as many people wanted to be paid using the system, only to find that their wallet addresses were incompatible with it.

BitPay even allowed some users to circumvent this problem for a while by letting people who did not wish to use BIP70 addresses in their invoices do it with an extraction destination. However, this feature was eventually removed.

Developers Dislike BIP70

One of the main reasons why BIP70 is so disliked is that the industry moved on and BIP21 is considerably more popular today. Luke-jr, a BTC developer, affirmed that only “a particular payment processor” (BitPay) still uses it and in a very broken way.

However, some people believe that the developers are simply attacking BitPay, which is a misguided move. Some also fear that the move may lead people to use Bitcoin Cash (BCH) instead of BTC if they lose another payment option because of how BitPay will be affected.

Is this change a good idea? That remains to be seen after the upgrade is made.