Just got out of newby jail...
I'm working on a set of patches centered around leveraging the DNS to facilitate looking up a bitcoin address for sendtoaddress. Currently the server expects a bitcoin address like 1GCVXLfF1TcpnnDLJRHk845NZhuJWQTnUD
These addresses are too hard for my friends to remember and I'd like to make it easier to use an address that looks much more like an eamil address. I have a patch to sendtoaddress so that it can take something like
rick@wesson.us which is not an email address.
In the DNS under wesson.us I've included a TXT record which can be resolved by prepending _btc and replacing the at (@) with a dot (.) so
rick@wesson.us becomes _btc.rick.wesson.us which can be resolved to the following text...
; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> _btc.rick.wesson.us txt
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 42745
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;_btc.rick.wesson.us. IN TXT
;; ANSWER SECTION:
_btc.rick.wesson.us. 300 IN TXT "BTC=1; 1GCVXLfF1TcpnnDLJRHk845NZhuJWQTnUD"
;; Query time: 159 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.2.2#53(192.168.2.2)
;; WHEN: Mon Jul 25 16:51:31 2011
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 91
I'm working on two efforts, one to patch sendtoaddress to preform the lookup if the address has an at-sign (@) and to encourage wallet hosting folks to also put their userids in the DNS as a text record. The second effort is to write a internet-draft that explains how to use the TXT record for bitcoin wallets and describe a potential new resource record called the Wallet Address or WA
I understand this effort will potentially erode some annomity for those that use it, and that what I'd like comments on. What is the social contract for ease of use -vs- security by obscurity. I'm also generally interested in comments on getting patches into the main line to support bitcoin adresses in the DNS.
-rick