Bitcoin Forum

Since not everyone needs their wallet address to be anonymous, such as merchants who are selling things to people, it'll be a lot easier for people to use bitcoin if they can say "send bitcoin to StoreX.wallet" than "please send bitcoins to 1NSSocd9qLHyjj4JpkqQfDiR7BePLn6MgS"

So some people who would prefere easy bitcoin wallet address can sign up for a wallet address domain such as ricksta.wallet but the block chain will still be anonymous as the record will be xxxBTC sent to 1NSSocd9qLHyjj4JpkqQfDiR7BePLn6MgS rather than ricksta.wallet

this way only the person who sent the bitcoin knows where they sent it to.

It can't be anonymous, but it's a nice idea to create shortcuts
You are going to create a new fork ;)

If the seller uses a single address for all receipts, how they know that they got your payment?

Heh, like DNS?

Wallet Name Service, WNS

wnslookup bigvendor

Non-authoritative answer: 1sDjdf09dgjASFhg7832dsdsfh

Doesn't the block chain keeps track of where the bitcoins you received came from?

You can just abuse standard DNS for this... just stick a TXT record in a well known place eg. _bitcoin,

So a client sending bitcoin to foo.com just looks up _bitcoin.foo.com and reads off the address from there.

The problem is (a) modifying DNS is easy for geeks, not so easy for grandma.  And geeks can already use bitcoin addresses.. So it doesn't really get us very far along the usability stakes, and (b) as it stands it's not good at multiple users per domain.

Now if someone can find a away of mapping email to bitcoin address without introducing massive amounts of infrastructure or a central database, then that'd be a good solution (as easy as paypal, without the fees.  People would go for that).

Namecoin is not a domain name system, but a name→value associated array. So there isn't a need for a hack or fork. That's the beauty of the whole idea! :D

A Namecoin "name" is composed of slash-seperated substrings, first of which is the "application specifier".

The current domain name system based on Namecoin uses the "d/" application specifier, with "s/" OR "dd/" proposed to specify extra domain data. That is, if you register "d/example", the value will contain information for example.bit.

However the chain will be used for other applications, such as keys, personal contact information, etc. and we need a standard specification so that we can link these together (link keys to domains or contact info for instance).

Bitcoin URI's come up as a good addition to a generic "contact info" entry. So, you will only need one name to store, for instance, your company address, skype id and bitcoin address, and applications can extract the info they need automatically.

So basically, when I say "send bitcoin to StoreX", the program will go and fetch the "p/StoreX" entry (or "c/StoreX" or whatever the standard scheme is) from Namecoin and get StoreX's bitcoin address from that.

Standard can be defined so that Namecoin values can import data from other names, which will allow distributing this data and delegating parts of it to other parties. Namecoin is a generic datastore with the same authoritative structure as Bitcoin, and possible applications are endless. :)

(Edited for clarification.)

P.S. If you happen to want to work on such a standard, I suggest that the best place start a collaborative effort is http://dot-bit.org/ . Check the draft specification for domain name entries (http://dot-bit.org/Domain_names).

Yup, sure does.

Your published payment address just got a payment that was last seen being sent to address 1NnZFpNK8aeL8PfDr4hMKDHQjoUkEPintE.  Which of your customers sent that to you?

Yep. Namecoin won't help you there. :)

EDIT: Though it could help, if there was a standard protocol for automation of such payments.

why doesnt the bitcoin protocol include a reference number?
I can see why you don't want the size of transactions to get out of hand because they are distributed, but a simple reference field similar to SEPA would be nice.

The receiving bitcoin address IS the reference number.

as you can see above, it is not.
that's like saying the SEPA account number is the reference number, because the receiver could open an account for each payment.

people obviously would like to publish their address for more than one payment but still be able to identify payments aside from the payed amount.

edit: the (important) difference is that a reference number can be freely assigned by the sender, not be generated by the receiver.

I have a friend who has a code built into his website to change legal ownership to a company when people buy it for use in that company.
I noticed the best way to fix that by remembering that code information.
It's quite simple. A message comes through saying this bitcoin address has purchased this item with this product number. This bitcoin address is related to this account connected to this email. This email is connected to this name. Bitcoin address is Email users name. This user bought this product. The system sends an email to the address and confirms whilst recieving an address to send such product. Simple.

Why add a useless field when there is a perfectly usable mechanism already in place that accomplishes what you need to do?  Every single ecommerce site on the internet that accepts bitcoins is already using unique addresses to relate payments to customers or invoices or whatever.

not all payments are due to personalized requests.

the best solution would be a field that can be filled with any data encrypted by the receiver's address public key.

Then why bother tracking it?


You actually can embed arbitrary data using OP_DROP.  Or at least the protocol supports it.  Nodes running the stock client probably won't accept or relay your transaction if you use it though, at least today.  Hard to say if it will catch on in the future or not.

But why waste bits?  There is already a mechanism to match payments to orders (or whatever), and it is in active use today on every website ever made that accepts bitcoins.

What about just adding say a "port number" to the wallet name to keep track of who sent you. eg. send 10bitcoins to ricksta.wallet:103

Basically the port number in the end will be unique for each transaction and you will know who sent you money from the unique port number.

I also like the e-mail address idea, but i'm not sure how that could be decentralized.