[bitcoin-dev] Named Bitcoin Addresses

["essofluffy ." <d.dehueck@gmail.com>]

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Hi Everyone,

An issue I'm sure everyone here is familiar with is the problem concerning
the fact that Bitcoin addresses are too complex to memorize and share.
Current Bitcoin addresses can be very intimidating to new users. As Bitcoin
grows it's necessary to provide a much more user friendly experience to the
end user. I think that having the capability to assign a unique name to a
Bitcoin address is in the best interest of Bitcoin and it's users.
I've recently come up with a method for assigning a unique name to a
specific Bitcoin address. I'm looking to get some feedback/criticism on
this method that I have detailed below.

Let’s run through Bob and Alice transacting with a Named Bitcoin Address.
Bob wants to collect a payment from Alice for a service/good he is selling,
but Alice wants to pay from her home computer where she securely keeps all
her Bitcoin. So now Bob needs to give Alice his Bitcoin address and because
Bob is using a Named Bitcoin Address and a supported wallet he can give her
an easy to memorize and hard to mess up address. Bob’s address is simply
‘SendBitcoinsToBob’ which can easily be written down or memorized. Now
Alice can go home send the Bitcoin from her own supported wallet and be
positive that she sent it to Bob.

Let’s look at how Bob’s supported wallet made that address.

First Bob let’s his wallet know that he wants to create a new address. In
response, his wallet simply asks him what he wants that address to be
named. Bob then enters ‘SendBitcoinsToBob’ as his preferred address name.
The wallet then let’s Bob know if his preferred address name is available.
If it’s available the name is broadcasted to the network and ready to use.

Now let’s get a little more technical.

When Bob inputs his preferred address name the client has to make sure this
name hasn’t been taken or else who knows where Alice will be sending her
Bitcoins. The client does this by referencing a downloaded “directory” of
names chosen by people using this system. This directory of names are
transactions sent to an address without a private key (but still viewable
on the blockchain) with the name appended to the transactions as an
OP_RETURN output. These transactions are downloaded or indexed, depending
on whether or not the wallet contains the full Blockchain or is an SPV
wallet. Because of such a large amount of possible address names a binary
search method is used to search through all this data efficiently. The
names could be sorted in two ways, the first being the first character and
the second being the total length of the name (I will being exploring
additional methods to make this process more efficient). So now that Bob’s
client has verified that the name has not been taken and is valid (valid
meaning it's under 35 bytes long and only using chars 0-9 and a-z) it sends
a transaction of 1 satoshi and a small fee to the address without a private
key as talked about earlier. The transaction's OP_RETURN output consists of
two parts. The implementation version of this method (up to 8 characters)
and the name itself (up to 32 characters). Once the transaction is
broadcasted to the network and confirmed the name is ready to be used.

Let’s look at how Alice’s supported wallet sends her Bitcoin to Bob’s Named
Bitcoin Address.

When Alice enters in Bob’s address, ‘SendBitcoinsToBob’ Alice’s client
references the same “directory” as Bob only on her device and searches for
the OP_RETURN output of ‘SendBitcoinsToBob’ using a very similar binary
search method as used for the verification of the availability of an
address name. If a name isn’t found the client would simply return an
error. If the name is found then the client will pull the information of
that transaction and use the address it was sent from as the address to
send the Bitcoin to.

Essentially what this idea describes is a method to assign a name to a
Bitcoin address in a way that is completely verifiable and independent of a
third party.

Please ask your questions and provide feedback.

- Devin

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