Support sending bitcoins using webpage URL?

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.

unor

Posted 2013-05-13T10:54:26.497

Reputation: 316

3These things should probably be implemented by browsers, not by clients. – Tom van der Woerdt – 2013-05-13T11:10:05.290

3You could create a browser extension yourself that allows you to donate to the current page (when it supports it). – Steven Roose – 2013-05-13T19:23:23.950

@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 – 2017-10-30T16:35:21.357

@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 – 2017-10-30T18:11:34.950

@asterisk: My reply to e-sushi’s comment above is about the same question: I don’t think it’s a duplicate. – unor – 2017-10-31T02:34:59.857

Answers

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. john.doe@ecdsa.org)
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 […]

unor

Posted 2013-05-13T10:54:26.497

Reputation: 316

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.

Joey Rich

Posted 2013-05-13T10:54:26.497

Reputation: 19

-2

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.

Evan Lynch

Posted 2013-05-13T10:54:26.497

Reputation: 623

You haven't addressed the question, you've just re-stated http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/bitcoin-url-scheme as already included and linked to in the question.

– dchapes – 2013-11-15T17:22:49.330

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 – 2017-10-30T18:13:06.647