Field description

What a bill holds. The fields divide into three groups: the parties, the terms, and the state the protocol maintains on top of them.

Participants

1. Drawer

   • The issuer of the bill.
   • Must be an identified party. An anonymous identity cannot issue a bill.

2. Drawee

   • The party the bill is drawn against: the one asked to accept and to pay.
   • Must be an identified party.
   • Cannot be the same entity as the payee at the time of issue.

3. Payee

   • The party to be paid, and the first holder.
   • May be anonymous.

4. Endorsee

   • The current endorsee, if the bill has been passed on. Absent on a bill that has never moved.
   • May be anonymous.

5. Endorsements count

   • How many times the bill has been endorsed.

6. All participant node ids

   • Every node id that appears anywhere in the bill.

The distinction in 1–4 is enforced by the types themselves, not by a check that could be forgotten: drawer and drawee are declared as identified participants, while payee and endorsee are declared as participants that may be either. A bill with an anonymous drawee does not fail validation; it cannot be constructed.

Terms

7. Sum and currency

   • The amount payable and the currency it is payable in.

8. Issue date and time of drawing

   • The date on the instrument, and the timestamp at which it was actually drawn. They are separate fields because the date a bill bears and the moment it was created are not necessarily the same.

9. Maturity date and time of maturity

   • When the bill falls due, as a date and as a timestamp. Maturity is what makes a bill a credit instrument rather than a payment, and it drives the payment deadline rules described in General conditions.

10. Country and city of issuing

    • Where the bill was issued.

11. Country and city of payment

    • Where it is payable. Not necessarily where it was issued: a bill drawn in Austria may be payable in Singapore.

12. Files

    • Attached documents: invoices, delivery notes, whatever evidences the goods behind the bill. Each is held as a name, a content hash and a storage hash rather than as bytes. See Backing up user material.

Maintained by the protocol

13. Id

    • The bill id.

14. State

    • Acceptance, payment and mint state. See Bill states.

15. Status

    • The derived summary of where the bill stands.

16. Actions

    • What the caller may do with the bill right now, given their roles. This is computed per caller, so two participants requesting the same bill receive different action lists. See Operations.

17. Active notification

    • The outstanding notification for this bill, if any.