lightning-blips/blip-0011.md

```
bLIP: 0011
Title: NameDesc
Status: Active
Author: Hampus Sjöberg <hampus.sjoberg@protonmail.com>
Created: 2022-01-27
License: CC0
```

## Abstract

NameDesc is a standard for conveying "receiver name" in BOLT11 invoices.

This bLIP serves to document what is already supported by some wallets (see
[Reference Implementations](#reference-implementations)), for posterity and so
that new implementations don't have to reverse-engineer general-purpose NameDesc
from existing implementations.

## Copyright

This bLIP is licensed under the CC0 license.

## Motivation

BOLT11 lets you include a description of an invoice. This is widely used across
the ecosystem, however there's no coherent or conventional way to write an
invoice description.

NameDesc provides a clear way on how to structure an invoice description that is
helpful for the user and which the wallet software can parse.

It specifies how the name of the receiver should be presented, something which
isn't always included. Not including the receiver name can lead to a transaction
log item only showing an ID or product name, but not the actual service or
store.

NameDesc is intentionally simplistic in order to make it easy for wallets and
services to adopt it. It also provides a very good experience should a wallet
not support reading NameDesc.

## Specification

NameDesc consists in prepending the actual invoice description with the receiver
name, a colon and two spaces (`:  `).

For example, Alfred's wallet can produce an invoice with the following
description:

```
Alfred:  payment for the bubblegum you owed me
```

When Barbara's wallet receives that, it displays something like:

```
Paying to: Alfred
Description: payment for the bubblegum you owed me
```

## Rationale

NameDesc paves a way for a more structured and standardised way of writing
invoices descriptions. Wallets that do not support NameDesc will still have a
graceful fallback, as they will show:

```
Description: Alfred:  payment for the bubblegum you owed me
```

And if the payee's wallet doesn't support including a "Name", Alfred can still
manually type his name in the description field. Not the best experience in the
world, but doable.

## Universality

NameDesc lives in the application layer. It is not necessary for a lightning
implementation to support/insert what the bLIP does here.

## Backwards Compatibility

This does not have backwards compatibility concerns.

## Reference Implementations

* Blixt Wallet: <https://github.com/hsjoberg/blixt-wallet/commit/e0ab93fdbaa92ec56bf920803bae22bf9108dfc4>
* lntxbot: <https://github.com/fiatjaf/lntxbot/commit/3bde760066ad5ae20e0672a53cdbd910f14d7149>
* Open Bitcoin Wallet: <https://github.com/nbd-wtf/obw/commit/e2b222db5ad92d8f348da4845b4e9fe3bf3c4917>