Lightning + NFC? The New Plan to Bring Bitcoin to Retail

Imagine a way to expand bitcoin payments to millions per second.

While that's daunting, developers are moving ahead on designs to make the payment system easier to use, with one recently submitting a proposal for connecting lightning with a payment technology that could make it feel as futuristic as it's touted.

Not a new idea in bitcoin or the payments world at large, NFC-based payments have caught on throughout Asia and Europe - not only on smartphones, but also through chips embedded in payment cards.

"I want the payments to be instant just like with the contactless cards we have here in Europe. A user would simply tap on the payment terminal and presto!".

Many bitcoin payments implementations tend to use QR codes - those pixelated-looking black-and-white squares that encode data that can then be scanned and consumed by smartphones.

"I'd like to see a system where the payment terminal sends a nice HTML receipt for the customer - that receipt has, say, a table list of your grocery shopping with subtotal, taxes, grand-total, perhaps a shop logo, some loyalty code or a coupon for future use," he said.

Cota is trying to get his NFC implementation added to the standards that lightning network developers have established in an effort to make sure all implementations are compatible with each other.

Already, Cota has come up with a rough standard, putting together a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions type, which is a format for sending data; an NFC application ID, which indicates the payment method is lightning; and a "Very simple protocol to forward socket data."

Though these pieces weren't so hard to come up with, Cota said he thinks it's important to write up a standard, whereby all NFC-enabled point-of-sale devices can accept any NFC-based lightning payment, now to be ahead of the game should NFC-based lightning payments take off.

"As you can see the is not really there yet but I'm working on it," he said, adding, "What I'm working on at the moment is a protocol that makes sure the NFC payment goes through even in case the paying device is offline."